Lydia Netzer: Shine Shine Shine

SUNNY LEFT THE HOSPITAL. When the car crash happened, Sunny was driving down the street toward home. Her smooth, white, manicured hands held the wheel. Her left foot pressed flat on the floor. Her head was up, alert, paying attention. The scent of someone’s grill wafted through her open window. And yet there still was a car accident. At the corner of majestic Harrington Street and stately Gates Boulevard, a black SUV smashed into her big silver minivan broadside. It happened on the very street where her house was planted. It happened that afternoon, on that very first day after Maxon went into space. No one died in the car accident, but everyone’s life was changed. There was no going back to a time before it. There was no pretending it didn’t happen. Other people’s cars are like meteors. Sometimes they smash into you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

After the hospital visit, she had buckled the boy into his seat in the minivan, and strapped his helmet on his head. He was a head banger, unfortunately, and it happened a lot in the car. While driving, she was explaining something trivial. She spent a lot of time talking out loud to Bubber, although he didn’t spend much time talking back. It was part of what they did for Bubber to help him with his difficulty, talking to him like this.

“It doesn’t matter which chair you get, right?” she said. “You just say, ‘Oh well!,’ and you sit in whichever chair is open. Because if you pitch a fit about your chair, you’re going to miss your art project, aren’t you? And it’s only a chair, right? It’s nice to have different-colored chairs. It doesn’t matter which one you get. You just say, ‘Oh well! It’s only a chair. I’ll get the blue chair next time!,’ and then you sit in the red chair. Say, ‘Oh well!,’ Bubber.”

Bubber said, “Oh well.”

His voice sounded loud, like a duck’s voice, if a duck talked like a robot. And he had to have a helmet on. Just for riding in the van. Otherwise, he sometimes whacked his head against the car seat, again and again, as the wheels drove over the joints in the road. It was terrible just hearing it happen. It was not something that Sunny ever wanted to hear.

“And then you sit down,” Sunny went on, “and you don’t even think about what color you’re sitting on, you just have fun with your art project. Because which one’s more fun, pitching a fit or doing an art project?”

“Doing an art project,” said Bubber like a duck.

“So you just say, ‘Oh well!’ and you sit down.”

Sunny waved one hand from up to down, to illustrate the point. Bubber hummed in his car seat. Sunny was plenty busy just being the mother of Bubber, but there was something else inside her, this baby making her pregnant. It had a heart and the heart was beating. Most of it could be seen on viewing machines at the doctor’s office. On the outside, a giant pregnant belly sat in her lap like a basket. The seat belt went above and below it. There was no returning from it. It was already here. In spite of what might have been done to prevent it, or any opinions she might have had that another baby was a bad idea, she was now over the line. She would be a mother of two, under the pale blond hair, in the trapezoidal minivan, in her own stately manor. In spite of the fact that Bubber hadn’t come out right, that he’d come out with some brain wires crossed and frayed, some extra here, some missing over there, she was going to be a mother again, because everyone wants to have two children. One just isn’t enough.

When Sunny was a little child, she had never envisioned herself having children. She had never played mother. Often she played sister, but never mother. Maybe that’s why she wanted another baby for Bubber. To save him from being an only child, just like her.

The car accident happened at a four-way stop. Sunny looked left, right, left again. When she looked, everything was clear. But then a black Land Rover shot toward her out of the street she was crossing. It smashed into the van with a crushing force. This is the end , Sunny thought. The end of me, and the end of the baby. The end of Bubber, too. There would be no family. After all this effort, there would be a bad outcome. It seemed monstrous, impossible. It shook her brain, thinking about it. She felt it rattle her bones. Poor Maxon , she thought, as the air bag hit her chest. What have we done to each other? There was a brutal specificity to the car accident at this time, in this place, and under the weight of all that reality, her heart felt like it had really stopped.

In that moment, sunshine still fell down through thousands of space miles to warm up the windshield in front of Sunny’s face, but with her mouth so grimaced, she looked like a monster. The sunglasses on her face pointed forward in the direction the van had been moving. The Earth rotated in the opposite direction. The van moved over the Earth on a crazy slant. After the smash, the cars were still moving a little, but in different directions now. The vectors were all changed. Air bags hissed. A sapling was bent to the ground. And at that tremulous moment, a perfect blond wig flew off Sunny’s head, out the window, and landed in the street in a puddle full of leaves. Underneath the wig, she was all bald.

Her mother was dying, her husband was in space, her son was wearing a helmet because he had to, and she was bald. Could such a woman really exist? Could such a woman ever explain herself? Sunny had time, in that moment, to wonder.

In the sky, in space, Maxon rotated on schedule. He always knew what time it was, although in space he was beyond night and day. At the time of the crash, it was 3:21, Houston time. He remembered how the boy, Bubber, had said good-bye so matter-of-factly. “Guh-bye, Dad.” How he had allowed himself to be kissed, as he had been trained, and Maxon had kissed him, as he had been trained. This is how a father acts, this is how a son acts, and this is what happens when the father leaves for space. How the eyes of the boy had wandered off to some other attraction, counting floor tiles, measuring shadows, while his arms clung around Maxon’s neck, never to let him go.

It was like any other day of work. He could hear her quiet words, “Say good-bye to your father.” So habitual. At age four, the mind could understand, but the boy could not comprehend. Why say good-bye? What does “good-bye” even mean? Why say it? It doesn’t impart any information; no connections are made when you say “hello” or “good-bye.” Of course, of course, a silly convention. Up away from the Earth, Maxon felt physically hungry. Hungry for a sight of his wife and child. Hungry for their outline, the shape they would make in a doorway, coming in. Among the stars, tucked into that tiny shard of metal, he felt their difference from the rest of the planet. It was as if Sunny were a pin on a map, and Bubber the colored outline of the territory she had pointed out. He could not see them, but he knew where they were.

Years ago, at the time when Sunny was born, the sun was fully eclipsed by the moon. The whole sun disappeared. Then it came back, just as hot.

The moon rarely manages to fully hide the sun from the Earth. In fact, it only happens every so often, and when it happens, you can only see it from certain parts of the world. On all the other continents, time passes normally. Even one thousand miles away, the morning continues without interruption. But right there, in Burma, in 1981, there was a full eclipse, and the sun was covered up for the minutes it took a baby to be born. Beside the Himalayas, there was a brown twilight on Earth and a bright corona in the sky. Sometime in the future, there will be another eclipse in Burma. But there will never be another baby born like Sunny. She was the only one, and her mother knew this from the beginning.