Mirror in the Sky (16 page)

NINETEEN

M
Y
father never came to the restaurant that night, and when I saw his car parked in the driveway, I assumed something was wrong. When I walked through the front door, I was startled by the dark. There was only one light on, in the kitchen, and my father was sitting in the living room, reading the
Economist
in the thin, jaundiced light that made the entire house look older, more weathered, and cheaper, if that was even possible. John Coltrane's
Blue Train
was playing on the turntable. He didn't hear me coming in, and didn't look up till I switched on a lamp.

“We dropped by the restaurant, my friends and I. You weren't there.” I sounded like a peeved adult scolding a child.

“Amit seems to be running things quite efficiently these days. They don't really need me there.”

I sat down on the sofa next to him. “Of course they need
you, Dad. Did you even leave the house today?” My father was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt in the middle of winter. He hadn't shaved in days.

“I'm fine, Tara. You don't have to worry about me, okay?” He sounded irritable, as though he wanted to be left alone, as though he wanted to regain a modicum of authority. “Your only job is . . .”

“I know . . . get good grades and act like everything's normal. But it's not. Mom's in California, you're hanging around here, completely depressed, and I . . .”

“Who said I was depressed? I just felt like taking a day off. When do I ever take days off?”

“Never. That's why I'm worried about you.”

“I'm the parent here, remember?” he said, but he hadn't really been acting like a parent in the past few weeks. He had been spending a good deal of his time on the living room sofa since my mother's departure, filling the indentation she had left behind.

I looked at my father, at the purple circles under his eyes. He looked tired, exhausted, really. Was it from a lifetime of what my mother thought of as a compromise? Just thinking about it made me sad.

I wondered, as I regarded him, if misfortune was contagious. It wasn't myself that I was worried about, but my father. Seeing him here, alone in a darkened house, made me think of my mother, every year on the anniversary of her parents' death.

“Dad . . . did Mom really . . . join a cult?” For a second,
I thought verbalizing it might make me feel better, but the moment it came out of my mouth, I realized that some things were better left unsaid.

My father slowly shook his head. “It's not a cult, it's some sort of spiritual seminar. She'll be back in a few months, completely refreshed.” But he sounded unconvinced, and this only inflamed my anxieties. Now that I had unsuccessfully prodded at the Pandora's box, I couldn't give up.

“Dad . . . do you feel like you compromised too?”

“Whatever made you say that?” he asked, looking at me in shock.

“Because . . . Mom said that we weren't . . . happy . . . that you had both compromised.”

My father put down the
Economist
and looked at me. “Your mom . . . she's having a crisis. Almost everyone goes through times like this, when they're uncertain, when they're questioning the decisions they've made.”

“Yeah, but most people don't just pick up and move to California. They don't just leave their families behind.”

“It's a strange time. Strange things are happening all around us. And sometimes at times like these, people feel the need to make drastic changes. But your mother's choice—it's not permanent, and it has nothing to do with you, okay? I want you to remember that. She's doing this because she feels she needs to, but I know that you are her greatest accomplishment, her greatest joy.”

“That's you, Dad,” I said.

“It's me too.” But his answers were like molasses, slow and
thick and syrupy and lacking nutrition. I wanted to know things, understand him and my mother, like those people who send away saliva samples to learn what kinds of genetic predispositions lay hidden like land mines beneath the surface of their skin.

“Dad . . .” I slowly said, knowing that I was about to ask him the question I most wanted to ask.

“Yes?”

“How come you don't want to make drastic changes? Didn't you want to be a physicist? Isn't there a part of you that wants to be at the center of all of this? You could have discovered Terra Nova. You could be one of the scientists working to learn more about it.”

What I really wanted to know, what I was ashamed to ask, was whether those seeds of complacency lay hidden within me too. It would have been a relief to learn that my father wasn't complacent, but I knew that to believe this would require a grand leap of imagination. My mother's words were like invisible ink—“We're not happy,” she had said, and only now was the truth becoming evident, in the aftermath of her departure, in my father's unshaven face, in his old torn T-shirt.

I understood now, as I watched him, what had brought my parents together, and what had driven them apart. She was like a child. She always had been. She brought light into his life and made him laugh. And he was the responsible one, the one who grounded us, made us feel like we had something solid beneath our feet. But in the last few years, my father rarely laughed. And based on my mother's decision to leave, maybe she looked
down at the ground beneath her one day and felt that her feet had been shackled to it.

“You'll understand when you're older,” he said. “Sometimes you just choose a path and keep walking along it. You don't realize that there are going to be unhappy patches ahead. But there are unhappy patches in any path. They're patches.”

“Do you wish you had taken another path?” I pressed. “Don't you wonder? Doesn't Terra Nova make you wonder about another version of you? What if the other you chose another path?”

“Wishing and wondering can be dangerous things, Tara. Of course, when they first detected that signal . . . I wondered. I thought about how I had given up a career in science. I fell in love with your mom, and all I wanted was to be with her. Maybe that's why I tell you to study, to work hard. I do want you to find what you love and to be able to do it. But the thing is . . . I made every decision in my life with open eyes, whether it was coming to this country, marrying your mother, moving here. There's still time for me to do the things I want to do.”

“When? When will you do the things you want to do?” I asked. It had never bothered me before, but today it did. My father wasn't old, but he wasn't young either. I wondered if he realized this. Then again, what did I really know about time? My hours were broken into periods, blocks of English and physics and gym classes that occupied a few semesters.

“Don't worry about me, Tara. I'll be fine. The only thing I'm sad about is that we've been separated as a family. But I don't think this separation will last.”

“How do you know?”

He shrugged. “Because all of these people driving themselves crazy, telling themselves there's something better out there, or that they've been arbitrarily trapped in this particular life . . . it's just silly self-flagellation. This life is all we have, and it's a good one. If we want to make changes, we should.”

“But that
is
what Mom did.”

“Well, no. Ideally, we should make those changes without disrupting other people's lives. We should think about the consequences of our choices. But maybe your mother didn't feel she was in a position to do that . . .”

I went to my room that night feeling worse than before. I had wanted something from my father, but I wasn't even sure what. I could tell he was unhappy, even if he claimed he wasn't. How could he possibly be happy running a restaurant when he could have been building a space probe? Discovering new planets?

At least my mother was running free toward her dream, cutting off the umbilical cord and finally making a choice in life, even if it meant hurting everyone around her. My father was this sad man left holding the bag. Honorable, maybe. But then, what was honorable about giving up your dream and pretending you were okay with it? I didn't know why, but it made me angry with him, and I went to sleep, a red haze underneath my eyelids, my teeth gritted in a rage.

TWENTY

I
T
was a grainy black-and-white transmission, but you could make out the image. A slightly stout man and an elderly woman facing each other. The man was wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a houndstooth jacket. The woman had distinctive features—a prominent but beautiful nose. “An intelligent nose,” my father would have called it. But my father didn't call it anything that night. He merely stared at the TV, dumbfounded. A banner across the screen read:
BCB NEWS
,
10
FEBRERIUS
,
1961
.

“Ms. Wool, author of twenty-five novels, university professor, women's rights and antiwar activist, thank you for being with us today.” The man smiled.

“Why, thank you for having me.”

“Why don't we start with you telling us a little bit about your work these days?”

“For most of my life, I've been a writer. But these days, I also teach and work on behalf of women.”

“You run a foundation, do you not?”

“Yes. It's called A Room for One's Own. It provides women writers with a stipend to write their first novel.”

“And it is Britainnia's most prestigious prize in literature. You're also actively involved in the antiwar efforts in Americus.”

“I was deeply affected by the two wars we had in Europa. After the second war, I nearly lost the will to live, and so when I first heard about Americus's intent to pursue a war in Nam Viet, I urged all writers and artists across the world to join me in protest. This, of course, came to be known as the Great Protest. I was amazed at the power of words to influence the world around us. In the end, it wasn't just writers and artists but people from every walk of life, from every corner of the world, protesting the act of war. This was followed by the global boycott of Americus's goods. Of course, the young in that country were already protesting, but once Americus saw the universal hatred for the war they were planning, just how much it would tarnish their image, the economic implications, they decided not to pursue it. I can't take credit, of course—there were countless other factors that went into Americus's decision. Perhaps they realized that they could never win this war, that many lives would be lost trying. Either way, I believe that antiwar efforts need to be global. Perhaps it takes an entire planet of people to shut down a war, but so be it.”

“How do you still find time to write, with everything else that you do?”

“My writing is still, to me, the most important thing I do.”

“And your writing has evolved over time, has it not?”

“It has, as I imagine any writer's work does. In the past twenty years, I feel as though I've entered another era of my life.”

“Tell us a little about that.”

“The earlier part of my life was difficult. Much of what I wrote about was loss. I experienced loss in the form of losing my parents, abuse from an older half brother, two wars, the loss of friends, and, during the darkest times, what felt like the loss of my own sanity. This allowed me to produce the kind of work that I did in my earlier life.”

“The experimental nature of your work . . .”

“That's what people say I am known for, but I write the way I think. I write as the words come to me. I hear words all the time, wherever I go, wherever I am, from both outside and from within.”

“You once said you heard birds singing to you in Greek . . .”

“It was a period of madness. For many years, I suffered from mental illness.”

“You've spoken a bit about the incident twenty years ago . . .”

The woman nodded. “I had finished the manuscript for
In Between
, and I was horribly depressed, as I sometimes am when I finish a novel. My house in London had recently been bombed. Life felt unbearable. I wrote Leonard a note, put on a large coat, and made my way to the river . . .”

The interviewer adjusted his glasses, discomfort evident in his face. “What happened then?”

“I was walking along the bank of the River Os, about to do it. I put rocks in my pockets. I was waist-deep when I heard a voice. It was Leonard. ‘Virginia!' he was yelling. He came after me and dragged me out. ‘You mustn't do it,' he said. ‘There's still so much for you to live for, still so much you need to do.' You see, Leonard always had a difficult task before him—every day, he made sure I slept and ate well and regularly and didn't have too much excitement in my life, and often I felt as though I was a burden to him, but all those years, every day, he saved me, and then he saved me yet again . . . I was so close to taking my own life that day.”

“But that day changed everything . . . your work has been deeply influenced by this event . . .”

“It has . . . I still think—what if Leonard hadn't been there at that moment? Everything would have been different. I began to think of the endless possibilities of my life, how we are all interconnected . . . What if Leonard had missed the train from London? Or what if he hadn't found the note I left for him? What if he hadn't seen my cane on the riverbank? I simply couldn't stop thinking about such things, and so I began to write about them. I also began to wonder . . . about that particular version of myself who waded out into the River Os. I feel as though there was a part of me that
did
die that day, a version of me that just as well might have, and it made me strive harder in my own life.”

“And today you are here, and Leonard . . .”

“Leonard passed away more than ten years ago. And yes . . . I am still here. Unbelievable, isn't it? I miss him terribly every day, and I am grateful for every moment I had with him.”

“For our viewers tuning in, we're speaking with Ms. Virginia Wool—poet, scribe, university professor, and Britainnia's strongest advocate for the rights of women.”

The screen cut to static.

A shiver went up my spine. I had been standing in the kitchen, a plate of kitcherie in my hand, and I had to sit down on the counter. For some reason I felt the urge to cry, and I began to.

“This is Edward Copeland, reporting on a video that NASA received and decoded just today. It's an interview with a poet and writer on Terra Nova who appears to be very similar to our own Virginia Woolf, who died in 1941. As you can see, some of the language they use on Terra Nova is different from our own . . .”

My father came over, placing a hand on my shoulder. He didn't say anything, and this frustrated me. I was overwhelmed with what was happening, in the world and in our own small life.

“She's alive up there . . . or at least she was in 1961. She didn't die. She lived. She stopped a war! And her words reached hundreds and thousands of people. They reached
us
!” I said to him.

My father nodded.

“How can you not wonder, Dad? About what all of this means?”

He was quiet for a long time before he responded. “I do wonder,” he said. “I wonder all the time. I don't blame your mother,” he added. There was a sympathy in his voice that I didn't understand, didn't want to. “She's just trying her best to make sense of a completely absurd world. We all are.”