Straying From the Path Read online

  Twisting, I looked over my shoulder. I was drifting away from the probe, untethered. Teresa called to me over the radio.

  “Listen to me, James. Please.”

  I would have done it. I would have taken off my helmet, to better hear the music of the stars. Compulsively checking my suit’s joints and readouts, I found I was safe. Everything sealed, air still flowing. I shut my eyes and relished the sensation of breathing.

  Cold light of the stars—I once heard about a man who walked out of an airlock at Artemis Base on Luna, plainclothes. No suit, just his uniform, skin, and lungs. He’d been up for some kind of reprimand, the story said, and he decided he’d rather face the vacuum. That was one explanation. But maybe something drew him. Seduced him into taking those fatal steps.

  There wasn’t anything wrong with the oxygen mix. I wasn’t buckling under the stress of watching our project get sucked down Jupiter’s gravity well. It was more like—Odysseus, hearing the Sirens.

  “Alvy, give me static.”

  “What?”

  “Feed some static over the line, the audio output of the electrostatic readings from Jupiter or something. Just—just fill the line with noise.”

  “Are you sane? Are you coming back here now?”

  “I’ve got air packs with me. Just give me static.”

  Alvy did as I asked, so I couldn’t hear anything but hissing, the white noise of a data stream. No singing. When I opened my eyes, the woman, the vision, was gone.

  I used a compressed air pack attached to the suit to jet back to the airlock. A couple of controlled bursts was all it took. My breathing stayed normal, the danger was over. In fact, it seemed long gone. Like a dream.

  Alvy met me at the airlock. Her shoulders were bunched to her ears with tension. It was good to see her.

  She was talking before she even lifted off my helmet. “No more kidding around, Barrie. What’s up with you? What’s happening with you out there?”

  Sullen, I clenched my jaw and stared at the floor. Honesty. Partnership. That’s what pulled me back from the song, but I still couldn’t open my mouth. I couldn’t just tell her: I’m going insane.

  “Talk to me, Barrie.”

  “If I tell you, you’ll tell Command, and they’ll ground me planetside.”

  “If you don’t talk, I’ll tell them you’re completely off-balance, and they’ll ground you anyway.” That was Alvy, eminently practical.

  “The data—electromagnetic, radiation. Have the readings been—strange?”

  “Strange how?”

  Maybe an effect of the swirling storms of radiation, the battling tides of gravity in the Jupiter system—its effect on people—had escaped detection until now. Regularly scheduled mining and survey missions to the other moons were only just starting. Maybe our prolonged exposure had affected our perceptions—

  I so wanted to believe in an outside explanation.

  “Maybe I’m just tired.”

  Anxiety induced delirium. The simplest explanation was probably the correct one. The greatest proof supporting this was my readiness to rely on folklore for excuses.

  Command gave us a timetable and programmed trajectory for the burn out of the system. We spent the next week collating data and shutting down our instruments. I spent some of that time on the observation deck, watching the view of Europa slip past. We’d found what all previous observations told us we’d find: silicate rock; oxygen; masses of frozen water, their surfaces cracked and scarred, broken and slushy from the heat generated by tidal flexing. We found the ingredients necessary for life, but not life, not so much as a colony of bacteria growing by an underwater thermal vent. Gray, somber, dead, she drifted.

  Anything else I’d seen—I had no proof it hadn’t been my imagination.

  I saw shadows of movement at the edges of my vision and decided not to look at them. I had been so desperate to find life, to be the one to make that discovery. So desperate, I saw phantoms.

  We had an hour-long fuel burn to accelerate, then a day of travel to take us far enough out of Jupiter space to use a Mandelbrot jump to Mars space. We spent the hour strapped into our crash chairs, adjusting to the sensation of weight, stuck with our thoughts to pass the time. Even with my eyes closed, I could see the shadows dancing, calling.

  I’d never had any kind of breakdown on a mission before, and I helped open Mars Polar. That statement usually got spacers to buy me drinks and pat my shoulder sympathetically. But maybe this was a sign; I’d been doing this too long. Maybe it was time to let Command ground me. If there wasn’t actually anything out there.

  “Alvy,” I said, my voice sounding loud in the cabin. “Have you ever lost so much equipment on a mission before?”

  “No. Why?”

  “What if there really is something out there?”

  “Something. Like what?”

  Something. Sirens that lured sailors to their deaths, the fairy maids that seduced young men only to drown them, imps that stole one sock of a pair out of the cleaner—

  “Something that causes wrenches and data chips to disappear, and a seasoned veteran to want to take off his suit during an EVA.”

  Whatever had taken Alvy’s wrench had taken my mind. Or maybe I’d just misplaced it, and I hadn’t looked hard enough. We had a few days until we reached Mars. Maybe Alvy could help me find it before the post-mission psych evaluation.

  Alvy stared at the monitors. The thrust of burning fuel rumbled through the ship, a pleasant background noise, preventing silence.

  When she spoke, her voice was calm, like a computerized countdown. “I’ll find that missing gear. As soon as we’re home, I know I will. It’ll all be under a deckplate. I put it there and forgot it, part of a little hallucination, just like you had. Objects do not just disappear off spacecraft.”

  That was our proof that we weren’t crazy. These things just didn’t happen. Not to us, not with our records. But Command wouldn’t see the situation that way. On the other hand . . .

  “We can always tell Command.”

  “Tell them what?” Alvy said, her voice strained with exhaustion and worry.

  “Everything that’s happened. Then we’ll tell them something was affecting our perceptions.”

  “Oh, they’ll love that. What kind of something did you have in mind? Gremlins?”

  Sort of, but I didn’t say it. “Something that requires more study before Europa can be opened for mining.”

  She opened her mouth to argue again, but paused. Understanding slowly lit her eyes. She turned to me.

  “Do you really think you saw something alive out there?”

  “Not alive. But something.”

  “They might buy it. They might really buy it.” She settled back in her chair, smiling. Really smiling for the first time in weeks, though her expression looked awfully conspiratorial. “If we’re going crazy anyway, it couldn’t hurt to try.”

  Behind us, receding now, the storms of Jupiter sang.

  The Happiest Place

  The worst part of my job is the terminally ill kids. The ones without hope, who get a wish from some charity or other, and they and their families come here. Sometimes, it’s a little girl who wants more than anything to spend her special day with her favorite princess. That’s way too much pressure to put on a twenty-one-year-old aspiring actress in a hoop skirt. I shouldn’t be responsible for making a dying child’s dream come true.

  I’ve done it twice now. The first was two months ago. Elizabeth, age ten, suffers from the final stages of a rare blood disease. Her mother just sent the park a letter saying she’s in the hospital again and keeps a picture of the two of us by her bed to cheer her up.

  The second is Abby. She has leukemia. She’s already had a bone marrow transplant, and it didn’t work. The cancer relapsed, and the doctors aren’t hopeful. Her family made the request to visit the park, and she asked to spend part of the day with me. Rather, I happened to be on shift the day that she asked to meet my persona. That’s all it is, luck
of the draw. It kills me, because I have to shut down that part of my brain that knows this kid is dying and wants to burst into tears at the unfairness of it all. I have to smile my princess smile until my cheeks hurt and pretend like everything’s going to be okay. And this kid smiles back at me and I think, how can you be so happy? How can seeing me dressed up in a blue satin gown and blond wig make you so happy?

  But of course, that’s not what the kids see. They see Cinderella stepped out of a fairy tale, and they believe that dreams are real. I wonder, do they ever dream of staying alive?

  Abby is like any other nine-year-old girl. When I step onto the sidewalk, her eyes light up and she gasps in delight. I’ve seen a whole crowd of girls gasp at the sight of me, and I’ll admit it goes to my head sometimes. It’s what keeps me here, when I ought to be spending my days at cattle calls in Hollywood.

  I’ve been told her name ahead of time, so it seems like magic when I kneel by her wheelchair and say, “Hello, Abby.”

  She’s bald as an egg, thin as a skeleton, and still she smiles, beaming so hard her face will surely break in two. Her brown eyes seem too large for her head, and they are gleaming.

  “What would you like to do first?” I say. “Would you like to see the castle?”

  She nods vigorously, and we go to see the castle, walking up the pathway, a whole crowd of us surrounding her wheelchair. Her family—parents, grandparents, aunt and uncle—follow behind us, Dad pushing the wheelchair, and all of them are smiling like this really is the happiest day of their lives. A park photographer runs alongside, snapping pictures. One of the pictures will sit by a hospital bed, no doubt. Abby holds my hand.

  This is so exhausting.

  I have a break at dinnertime. I’ve promised to return to watch the fireworks with Abby, and she’ll remember the moment for the rest of her life, however many weeks of it the doctors say she has. She’ll remember the moment through the needles, pain, and fear, and that’s what keeps me going. That’s what gets me through when what I really want to do is run screaming that I can’t do this, I’m not a princess, I’m not a dream come true, I’m just a kid myself and I quit college because I thought I could be an actress and my boyfriend just broke up with me and I’m in a thousand family photos with a thousand little girls, smiling like a Barbie doll. But Abby will think of me when she’s afraid, and maybe it will help, and maybe, just maybe, the magic is real sometimes.

  After my break, I come back through the Cast Members Only door and find Christine, Abby’s aunt, sitting on the ground behind a trash can, sobbing. Christine, Abby’s mother’s younger sister, is in her late twenties, young and smiling herself, though today her smile is the plastic one people wear when they really want to burst and scream. Most of the adults around Abby have worn that smile for at least part of the day. Christine has cheerfully pushed Abby’s wheelchair and carried bags much of the time so Abby’s parents could be close to their daughter, hold Abby’s hand, and ooh and ahh with her at some new wonder. Christine is support staff. I understand the role.

  And she’s broken. She hid herself away behind hedges and trash cans so she could break. I think of walking away. Let her put herself back together, rejoin the group, and pretend her eyes aren’t red and puffy.

  But I kneel by her and put a satin-gloved hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  “What? Oh—it’s you.” She looks up, startled, sniffles loudly, and scrubs a sleeve across her face. “I’m sorry, I just had to get away for a minute.”

  “You can only pretend to be happy for so long.”

  She nods, and I see the family resemblance with Abby, an earnestness that comes through in the gesture.

  “It’s just . . . this place. It’s so amazing, but everywhere we go they talk about dreams, and they sing about dreams, and at every step they tell you that dreams come true and that people live happily ever after. Well—it was my sister’s dream to have a baby, to have a beautiful little girl and watch her grow up. Then this happens. I look at Abby, and she’s so happy, and her dream has come true, and how can this place be so real and so impossible at the same time!”

  The words come in a rush and she’s sobbing again, tears streaming, her back hunched, shuddering. My own floodgates are opening, the actress-brain that manages to keep it locked away failing.

  I turn my face away, close my eyes, and take a deep breath. “Stop it,” I say quietly. “My make-up’s going to run.”

  Christine’s sob turns into a laugh. “Oh God, I’m sorry! And your dress, you shouldn’t be on the ground like this! You know, for just a minute I forgot you’re not really Cinderella.”

  The tears start all over again. I’m sitting beside her by this time.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” she says. “I can’t go back.”

  I know exactly how she feels. I put my arm around her shoulders. She hugs me back, her face pressed to my shoulder, and cries it all out. I hold her and whisper nonsense. That everything is going to be all right. Like I am really Cinderella, like I really can make everything better.

  After closing, after the fireworks have faded and all the lights are out, I go into the park. We’re not supposed to do that. I’d said goodbye to Abby and her family, and I wonder how long my picture will sit by her hospital bed.

  For a long time I stand on the bridge before the castle, looking up at its parapets, its gilded filigree confections. Wearing jeans and a tank top, I’m not a princess anymore. Under that fairy tale façade is nothing more than wood and concrete. Just like we’d all put on a good face today, to make this the happiest day of Abby’s short, short life. When underneath we’d turned to ash.

  I am a rank, despicable liar.

  I want to make a wish of my own, but I have too many choices. Blue Fairies, stone wells, godmothers, evening stars. The smog and haze is such that I can only see one small star, shining faintly, right above the castle. A stray bit of firework that has forgotten to fall back to earth. It almost seems like an omen.

  Tonight, I choose the wishing well for my late-evening ritual. I only do this sometimes, because to do it every night would spoil it, make it ordinary. Only days like this when I have a sick girl’s short future weighing on my shoulders. I find the wishing well and put my hands on either side, leaning all the way over the edge, calling down inside so my voice echoes.

  “I’m wishing!”

  For happiness, unspecified. I don’t know what I want anymore.

  * * *

  A week later, I receive a letter from Elizabeth’s mother. My supervisor wore a grim smile when she handed it to me. Elizabeth slipped into a coma and passed away quietly last week. She talked about her trip to the park right up to the end. Thank you, thank you, and thank you, her mother writes. For what? I ask myself that more and more. I wonder how Abby is doing.

  How can such a little piece of magic be so strong in the face of that immense tragedy? I fold the letter and secure it in my purse.

  That evening I find a tiara at the bottom of my locker. I don’t recognize it from any of the costumes. All the usual tiaras are glittering, decked with rhinestones, visible from miles away so no one will mistake their wearers for anything but princesses. This is different, plain, a half-circlet of gold with a clear, faceted gem mounted in the center.

  A slip of paper is tied to one of the arms. I pull the note free of the string that ties it.

  One line of handwriting reads, I can’t do this anymore. I pass it on to you.

  The writing looks like a woman’s. The words are clean, but the paper is wrinkled, as if whoever wrote it crushed the note, then smoothed it flat again. I look around the locker room for someone who might be watching me, who might have snuck the tiara into my locker then lingered to see my reaction. Only the usual bustle fills the place, dancers peeling off tights, character actors laughing in the showers as they wash off the smells of their plush suits.

  The locker next to me belongs to Audrey, who plays Sleeping Beauty in one of the stage shows. I sometimes
don’t recognize her, because her short black hair is so at odds with the blond wig she wears for her character.

  “Audrey?” She turns to me, inquiring. I show her the tiara. “Do you know whose this is?”

  She shakes her head. “No, sorry. I don’t even recognize the costume.”

  “Yeah, neither do I.” The front of the locker room has a lost and found box for stray bras and sneakers and the like. I hate to just leave it there.

  “Some of us are going out for dinner. Want to come?”

  I’m tired. The exhaustion settles on me like a warm blanket. The letter about Elizabeth hasn’t improved my mood. I shake my head at Audrey. “Not tonight. I’m beat.”

  “Maybe next time.” She slings her bag over her shoulder and heads out with some of the other girls.

  I hold the tiara in both hands, and it feels warm against my skin.

  I slip it into my backpack and take it home.

  The studio apartment in a not so nice part of town is good enough, because I’m hardly ever there, between work, auditions, classes and scraping together enough to get by. Ramen noodles or pasta await my leisure, but I don’t make dinner. I leave my backpack by the front door, after taking out the tiara.

  Holding it, I sit in the middle of the floor and wonder. Just a bit of strangeness, maybe even a bit of magic, like the well, like being a girl’s dying wish.

  I put the tiara on. It settles comfortably above my ears.

  I close my eyes and see a room, a studio apartment like this, but worse, with peeling paint, holes in the carpet, and soiled furniture. A family of six lives there, a mother and five children. Father in prison. A girl, the oldest of the kids, sits at a kitchen table doing homework, not minding her siblings screaming around her, her mother’s scolding, the noise of a television. Her pencil scratches math problems, and she works through to the end of the page. Then she digs a history book out of the stack and reads. She wants to go to college, the thought comes over me like an electric shock. But she’ll never get there without help.

  So I grant her wish. Just like that, because I can, because the girl is working so hard and I want her to succeed, I want this little bit of magic to work. One day she checks the mail and finds a letter telling her about the full ride scholarship she’s won. She won’t just pull herself out of poverty, she’ll pull her whole family. I see it all, it will happen. The certainty is as wondrous as the wish come true itself.