She closed her eyes and imagined the Earth spinning below her. It was an even more amazing sight than the Skywheel, the home planet stretching out beneath her. It was easy to make out a hundred different places that she’d seen on maps, but it was completely different viewing it from 250 miles up. The globe seemed to spin visibly below as she’d watched, even though she knew it was her rocketing around the planet. It felt like she wasn’t moving at all and it was the Earth spinning.
Down there somewhere, David Abelman was taking photos.
“Are you thinking of me at all, David?” she wondered aloud.
How could he not think of her, at least occasionally?
It’d been six months since their fight, and Karen still couldn’t help feeling anger at him whenever she thought about it.
To David, science was everything. She knew better.
Science was critical, but no scientist in the world can explain why e = mc2. Nobody knew why quantum mechanics worked or why evolution selects for the members of a species that are most adaptable to change. David couldn’t tell her why an apple falling from a tree uses the same law of gravity that currently pulled on her to send her on her own orbit around the Earth.
Who decided those things, David?
He never had an answer to that, of course. He preferred to think that discovering natural laws was all that was needed. There was no need to explain how the laws were built in the first place.
Karen rubbed her eyes and yawned. God created the laws. What was so ridiculous about that?
Chapter 10
I ate some lunch and thought about what I had left to do before the funeral. Nothing seemed urgent, so I tried to think about memories of Grandma instead.
She was a kind woman, always rushing to get things done. I wondered if that was because of her experience in Auschwitz. That time scarred her for her entire life, especially when she was rescued but so many of her family members weren’t, having already been murdered.
Somehow, though, she not only survived, but she thrived. She had a daughter, my mother, and then she became my own surrogate mother.
She was never married, and once when she was worn to the bone from working all day, she let out one of the few secrets she ever told me.
“Never married, David. Never wanted to.” I must have looked puzzled at her, because she did have a child, of course. “None of your business how things happened, but just know that I loved your mother with all my heart. I loved her as much as I love you, but if it’d been my choice, I never would have borne her.”
“How did it happen, then?”
I think I was about fifteen when I asked her that, and her answer reminded me how little I knew about her life.
“I was raped.”
Those three words were all I ever found out about my heritage, and as soon as she said them, I felt a confusing shame come over me, as if it was somehow my fault. I went to hug her, but she stood and went to the bathroom. She stayed there for more than an hour, and the guilt grew in me, both for how my mother was conceived in the first place and for falling into this conversation with Grandma that was obviously so hard on her.
Even now, a decade later, it weighed on me. I finished my egg salad sandwich (which included Ariela Adelman’s secret ingredients of mustard and a pinch of sugar) while I thought more about my mother.
Her name was Molly. She was a big woman, quite obese. I hate saying that, but it’s true. I’ve seen a couple of photos that Grandma had of her, and she must have been close to 250 pounds.
My mother was another of my grandmother’s secrets, things she didn’t like to talk about. Almost certainly that was partly to do with how she was conceived, but there was something else I never figured out.
I find it odd to call her Mom, so I’m going to call her Molly. She died when I was five years old, and I don’t remember anything about her.
The few other things I know from Grandma: Molly was thirty-nine years old when I was born. She also was never married. Grandma never mentioned any steady boyfriends, so it’s a mystery how Molly got pregnant with me. I hoped it was a happier story than Grandma’s, but I have no idea.
Five years after I was born, Molly Abelman was rushing down the street, with me in tow, rushing to her mother, Ariela. There was urgency to the trip, because Molly was late for work and had to drop me off for the day. Grandma would babysit.
My mother worked at a factory that made automobile tires. I don’t know anything more. I don’t know what job she did there, what the name of the company was, whether she liked what she did or hated it… nothing.
She rushed, though, and… well, it’s not really a surprise, is it? She had a massive heart attack and died on the street.
Every once in a while I try to think back to that event. Why can’t I remember anything about it? Five is old enough to have that burned into my memory forever. At least that’s what should have happened. Now, though, the only images I have of my mother are vague yells and some thumps as she walked through our home.
I don’t remember ever having a hug from her, and one question had bothered me for many years: Did my mother love me?
If she had loved me, surely I would have retained some sense of that, even now. Wouldn’t I? I’d remember her holding me, lying beside me to comfort me if I was sick, playing games or going to the beach together. Why didn’t I remember any of that?
Thinking of it made me realize how little I knew of my entire family history.
Ariela had left me the family tree over on the kitchen table, and once we were past the funeral and the grieving, I planned to research some of my family, starting with my mother. I don’t know why I never googled her name before, but it was time to find out my heritage.
Then I snapped to attention.
Why would I bother searching online for my mother, when all I had to do was go back to when she was still alive?
After all, my dead grandmother was a working time machine.
I closed my eyes and forced myself to relax. It was getting faster each time to find the right way to meditate and find the secret area of my brain that allowed me to use the Shelljah magic.
Soon, I felt the now-familiar experience of taking control of my body as a passenger. I pressed the brake pedal, and time slowed to a halt. Pressing the imaginary reverse pedal moved my body backward, backward, faster and faster. Time travel was a magical science. I had a long journey, and as I concentrated more, my body ended up blitzing into the past, my life an unfocused stream of fractional images, bright and dark flashes, and in my gut I knew how long to keep going, even though I couldn’t really understand a damned thing I was seeing as the years scattered by.
It felt like intuition, knowing the right time to stop, and when I halted travel, the images morphed to real life again.
I felt light, small, almost fragile.
My body hadn’t yet reached its fifth birthday. The consciousness that controlled it was awkward, not always knowing how to do anything. I didn’t interfere, since the shock of being a child was overpowering. I felt both my twenty-five-year-old mind and my four-year-old mind at the same time. The younger self frightened me. I wasn’t sure he had any idea what he was doing.
It didn’t occur to me to look in a mirror to find out what I looked like. I didn’t have to. I was in my own body with my own set of memories and experiences, limited though they were. I’d looked in the mirror every day to brush my teeth, and those experiences were as real as any others. I knew exactly what I looked like because I was that four-year-old.
We were outside, a nice summer day. I had a red rubber ball with a blue stripe circled around it. It was about the size of an orange.