“Your family?” she said. Before I could stop her, she reached across my desk and picked up the framed picture that I always kept facing myself. It was an old photo, from when my children were small, and my husband and I were both thinner and less gray.
“Yes.”
She shifted her gaze from the photo to me. I was discomfited by the intensity of that look, and I saw it for what it was: an accusation.
“Your family is real, but mine isn’t? Real people with real feelings, but my family isn’t—” She ran out of air and took a gulp. “—real to you. You think. I’m a character. A story. Those women you talk about. Not real people to you. Stupid women. Stupid photo albums. But you. You’re smart. You make smarter choices. For us.”
She was almost panting and, seeing the way the picture trembled in her hand, I rolled my chair back from the desk. Although there had been a few close calls, I’d never actually had a physical altercation with anyone. I always kept the door open so that if things got heated the bailiffs could hear, but Wavy’s anger was so hushed no one had noticed.
“Please don’t upset yourself. I really do have to go to court.” I stood up and walked around the desk. Although she was still holding my family photo, she didn’t try to stop me, so I poked my head out into the hallway and gestured for the bailiff. “Edward, would you please escort Miss Quinn out?”
She put the picture frame down and went with Edward, but as she walked away, she raised her voice.
“I’m real. I’m as real as you are. My family is real like your family,” she said.
17
WAVY
I needed to get back to Norman in time for my afternoon class, but when I passed the exit for the old quarry where we raced the Barracuda, the rotation of the Earth seemed to slow. The sun hovered at a standstill in the sky while I turned the car around and drove back through Garringer. I used to think of it as a big city, but now it was gone in a blink, and I was on the road to Powell.
Driving down Main Street, I felt like I was in a ghost story, but I didn’t know who was the ghost—me or all of Powell County. Downtown wasn’t much different than I remembered, maybe a few more storefronts were empty, but the hardware store had the same tools in the window, and the Shop ’n Save had hail damage to their front sign. Off Main Street, Cutcheon’s Small Engine had a yellowed sheet of notebook paper taped in the window. “Closed till further notice,” it said in Mr. Cutcheon’s handwriting.
Kellen’s house was occupied, but rundown. Nobody had painted it since we did, and the carport looked like it was about to fall down. Two dogs chained up in the front yard barked at me as I walked past.
On the drive out to the meadow, I turned off the air-conditioning and opened the windows. The heat and the dust rolled into the car, but the wind in my face was the closest I could get to riding on a motorcycle.
There was a new double-wide parked where Sandy’s trailer used to be, but I think the people living there were actually farming, because there were tractors parked by the barns. Cattle grazed in the meadow, and they turned their heads and watched me with soft brown eyes as I drove past. The driveway to the farmhouse was so washed out, I had to park on the road and walk up, getting gravel in my fancy shoes.
The honeysuckle vines had crawled up over the front porch and collapsed the trellis below the attic window. The screen door flapped in the breeze, and the kitchen door stood partway open. When I lived there, we’d never had a key to the kitchen door, so the police must have simply pulled the door closed. Anyone who wanted to walk in, could, including me.
I hadn’t been inside the house since Donal and I left that July to go visit Aunt Brenda. She never allowed us to come back. The kitchen floor was stained brown from Val’s blood, and grayed over with the dust of strangers walking through. Vandals must have used the table and chairs to build fires in the front room’s fireplace. They’d left behind beer bottles and spray painted the dining room walls. Upstairs in my room, Aunt Brenda had only taken the quilt Grandma made. She took that to Tulsa and packed it away, because it was an heirloom, too valuable to use. She’d left the little black and white TV, and someone had broken out its screen. I could see from the dirty sleeping bag and the condom wrappers that strangers had used the bed where Kellen and I spent so many nights lying next to each other.
I came back down to the kitchen and stood at the spot where Val had died. Just a few feet away from where Kellen kissed me for the first time. I pulled the kitchen door closed as I went out, and the porch floor creaked as I crossed to the steps. Walking back to my car, I followed the overgrown path to the limestone steps, where Kellen had sat after his wreck.
I’d been wrong about the Earth’s rotation slowing. It went on as steadily as always, and the afternoon was long gone. To the west, Venus and Jupiter held court with the setting sun. A few days before, the Magellan spacecraft had reached Venus, and started sending back pictures. Below the horizon lay Orion, resting until autumn, when he would rise over the meadow with only the cows to see him.
I thought then of Voyager 1 and 2, so far away. They were launched the same year I met Kellen, and now they had reached the end of our solar system. Although their programs were being powered down one by one, they traveled on. NASA said that in another twenty-five years, they would exit our heliosphere and cross into interstellar space. In another three hundred thousand years, Voyager 2 might reach as far as the star Sirius, but it would never come home.