Claire Holroyde - The Effort

The fog wouldn’t help Healy ’s pilot, however. Weber couldn’t help a smile when he thought of Ned Brandt, a strapping, clear-eyed young man with an unpredictable depth of character. When he wasn’t losing his shirt at poker in the crew lounge, Ned was reading Steinbeck novels while eating twigs of jerky. On deck, he was the first to lend a hand to the other crewmembers or scientists. Backbreaking labor and long hours never stopped him from smiling or remarking on the beauty of cerulean water. He even used the word cerulean before farting into the wind as he paused to admire. Weber wasn’t supposed to have favorites, but he did.

The captain walked to the ship’s weapons locker and found Ned waiting in a flight suit. As soon as Healy passed the mouth of Commencement Bay, he would lift off.

“Well, this is one way to get out of gambling debt,” Weber joked as he reached into his pocket for a key.

Ned’s eyes crinkled when he smiled. His face was young but also freckled with exposure.

“The defense effort could use me,” Ned reminded him.

It could use a Hail Mary more than anything, but Weber only nodded. Ned tried to thank him again for the extra fuel, but it wasn’t necessary. Ned was the ship’s sole pilot, so the fuel in the Dolphin helicopter’s tank would only go to waste. Weber had ordered his men to drain the Dolphin and pack up the Jayhawk with as many canisters as she could hold.

“What’s your plan B, son? Just in case you can’t hitch a ride south from Fort Hood,” he asked Ned, but they both knew he meant, Just in case there is no Fort Hood.

Ned said that he was still working on a plan B. The captain pursed his lips and nodded.

“Sir, something I want you to know,” Ned said. “When I picked Healy for assignment, I was picking you.”

Ned offered his hand, but the captain embraced him briefly and patted his meaty shoulder.

“Godspeed,” he blessed. “Now, let’s get you armed.”

Weber unlocked the weapons locker and lifted a semiautomatic rifle from the rack.

“We’re not talking polar bears or hostile smugglers anymore,” Weber conceded, “but the same rule applies: When you need to shoot, you shoot. Period.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Ned took the rifle, but his eyes lifted back up to the gun rack.

“Have you decided who’s gonna get the rest?”

Weber frowned and averted his eyes.

“I’m advising them to travel in groups and protect each other.”

It wasn’t an answer because Weber didn’t have an answer. There was no right way to divvy up a small number of firearms among a large crew about to make a run for their lives. He had looked at the problem six ways to Sunday and still couldn’t determine a just decision.

“You said ‘them,’” Ned said. “You’re not headed to Lewis-McChord with the others?”

Weber shook his head and said he was headed for the Cascade Mountains and would take his chances on his own, like Ned. The younger man gave a quizzical smile.

“The funny thing of it is,” Ned said, “I’m not going alone.”

ZHEN’S MOTHER HAD no tolerance for her daughter’s dried tears and the shame prescribed by others. She understood that Zhen was a girl with a very slight facial deformity, and for that she was bullied and made to feel less than worthless, a bad element that needed to be stamped out of a community. But Zhen was beloved by a family that had fought too long and hard to give in now.

“Words don’t draw blood,” her mother insisted. “You don’t know real suffering.”

She paused from chopping garlic for their dinner and wiped her hands on her apron. This was usually when her mother began telling horrific stories that Zhen knew by heart and still feared, but Zhen was twelve years old. While she tried to be invisible outside the safety of home, she was testing her voice inside it—especially with her mother.

“You don’t know what I know,” Zhen said quietly. “Because you’re not me.”

The logic was faultless, but her mother still looked stricken. Zhen used the silence to continue.

“No older boys called you a shit-eating sewer rat because of this,” she said, pointing to her upper lip.

Zhen’s scars had paled, but her upper lip was still slightly lifted and skewed from reconstructive surgery.

“They have a point,” Zhen admitted. “I do look like a rodent or rabbit, without the whiskers.”

What she didn’t say was, No one will want to kiss this mouth.

The girls at school talked about boys incessantly, but Zhen could only listen at a distance. She might wear the same uniform, but she was not one of them. She was different in too many ways. Zhen knew it. They knew it. And knowing made it all the worse.

Zhen walked past her mother into the family room. The Lius still didn’t have a TV like most of their neighbors in the apartment building, much to Zhen’s disappointment; she found the science and near magic of broadcast images fascinating. Zhen’s father said that the Liu family didn’t spend carelessly on appliances; they invested in their children. Zhen had had two facial surgeries before she was old enough to remember. Kuo, her older brother by four years, had been privately tutored in several foreign languages during secondary school and now studied in Cambridge, England. Despite these large investments, the Liu family wasn’t struggling. Comrade Liu was the manager at the Chongqing power station and was held in high esteem. The family owned a nice dining table set carved from rosewood. A sofa sat against the wall, framed photographs covered the walls, and a bookshelf was full of hardbacks with titles such as Power System Engineering , Electric Fields and Circuits , Thermodynamics , Differential Calculus , and the latest cookbooks gifted to Zhen’s mother to inspire her utilitarian meals.

Zhen folded her coat over the arm of the sofa before she continued down a small hallway. Their apartment in Chongqing had two bedrooms: Zhen’s parents slept in the larger master bedroom, and her grandfather now slept in the smaller one. He had come to live with the family over a year ago after his wife passed. Zhen didn’t mind sleeping on the sofa and moving her clothes into neat piles against the family room wall. Her paternal grandfather was a national hero, a mathematician who had survived the Cultural Revolution by working for the military’s intelligence unit as a cryptographer. On the other side of her family, Zhen’s maternal grandparents were university professors before they were labeled class enemies and sent to laogai camps, never to be seen again—no bodies, no graves.

Zhen saw cigarette smoke hanging in a haze by the smaller bedroom door. One would think that Zhen’s grandfather loved cigarettes more than anything in life, but he had to love her more, because he stubbed them out in a ceramic ashtray whenever she visited. Zhen never complained, but he knew the smoke made her cough. She knocked on the bedroom door and waited, and then knocked again. Her grandfather slept a lot; living so many decades was exhausting.

When Zhen entered the musty bedroom, her grandfather was sitting up in one of the twin beds. He lay against pillows propped against the wall. A quilted blanket covered the lower half of his thin body. His brown face creased with a sunken, toothless smile, like the fissures of a walnut. Zhen took heart. How could she be all the ugly things her bullies claimed while in the loving arms of such an important family?

Her grandfather plucked his dentures from the bedside table while Zhen unzipped her backpack and pulled out a thin stack of papers. She didn’t want to show schoolwork, only her personal investigations: Zhen work. Her grandfather nodded as he inspected her technical drawings.