Karen Walker - The Age of Miracles

“I knew it was him as soon as I saw him,” my grandfather used to tell me.

At this moment in the story, he would shake his head slowly, close his eyes, and whistle slightly, satisfied by the proof in flesh of a truth long sensed.

“I always knew he was alive,” he would say. “I always knew.”

My grandfather once lost his wedding ring—it flew off his finger and into an Alaskan snow bank—but he found it months later, in the spring. The snow had melted. The gold ring was lying in the dirt. Finger was reunited with band. My grandfather liked any story in which the unlikely turned out to be true.

“But why did Rolf disappear in the first place?” I always asked. For my grandfather, this was not a key part of the story. Or perhaps the reasons for a man to leave his life were too obvious for him to name.

“I know he recognized me on that bus,” my grandfather would say. “But he didn’t say anything. At the next stop, he just stood up and got off. Didn’t even look back.”

His uncle disappeared into the woods on the side of the road. My grandfather never saw him again.

“That would be just like Rolf,” my grandfather used to say with a certain admiration crackling in his voice. “Just like him.”

It was after midnight when we got home from Circadia. Our street was bright and quiet, almost everyone asleep. It was the lifeless middle of a bright white night. Our cul-de-sac looked evacuated. Not even Sylvia was out. The slamming of our car doors echoed against the stucco. A pair of clouds scudded westward on the breeze. The only sign of life was a skinny Siamese cat squinting in the sunshine as it traipsed across the Petersons’ artificial lawn.

My parents stayed up all night, calling hospitals.

I pulled my curtains and tried to sleep. Cracks of sunlight streaked the carpet. My alarm clock ticked on my dresser, and I was newly aware of its swiftness: the ticking, ticking, ticking. Minutes zoomed. Hours flew. I slept little. I dreamed unsettling dreams. Days, months, years, whole lives—everything was rushing toward its end. At the appointed hour, my alarm clock exploded; it was time to get up for school. I woke with a racing heart, out of breath and sweaty in my sheets.

Later that morning, the police called with a report of an elderly man who had been found wandering, disoriented, in a nearby grocery store. My father drove down to the police station to confirm what we already knew: It wasn’t him.

Three days passed. There was no word from my grandfather.

And it felt as if Seth Moreno had gone missing from my life as well. He arrived later and later at the bus stop each morning. In math, he stared straight ahead, always rushing from the classroom as soon as the bell rang. We had not exchanged a single word since the day we saw the whales. I did not know what I’d done wrong.

Meanwhile, the days kept growing, the nights kept spreading. There was talk of tipping points, feedback loops, points of no return.

Later that week, NASA announced that the astronauts were coming back, in spite of the risk. No one knew exactly how the slowing would affect reentry, but they had run out of food in the space station. A thousand calculations were made, some necessary guesses. We’d been told that the Orion would streak across the southern California sky at three minutes past four o’clock on its way to Edwards Air Force Base.

I planned to watch it through my telescope, alone.

It was bright and hot outside as I stepped off the bus that afternoon. The sun had been shining for twenty-something hours. The asphalt was glittering. A warm breeze was blowing leaves and litter through the neighborhood.

As I walked toward home, I was thinking of the astronauts. They’d been away for ten months, the last humans left who had not yet experienced a day longer than twenty-four hours.

As I cut across a vacant lot, I was surprised to see Seth on his skateboard. He had disappeared from the bus stop right away but had paused here and was using the curb to do jumps near a fire hydrant.

I resisted the urge to look in his direction as I walked. I could hear the clean clip of his board striking the curb again and again. I kept walking.

But when I turned in the direction of my street, the noise stopped. In its place, I heard the most unbelievable sound: the three syllables of my name shouted on the wind.

“Yeah?” I said.

A sudden lump formed in my throat.

The other kids had scattered. It was just the two of us and the dust from the dirt lot blowing across the street.

“Are you gonna watch the rocket?” he said. He shielded his eyes from the sun with one hand. Our shadows mingled on the sidewalk.

“Maybe,” I said. I was skittish and shy.

“I’m gonna watch it from my roof,” he said. A breeze blew. Seconds passed. “Come on.”

Maybe I should have been angry about the way he’d acted before, but all I remember is the wave of his hand as he motioned for me to follow him, the way he pronounced the exact words that my ears most wanted to hear.

From his cluttered garage, we dragged two rusty beach chairs into the house and then up the ladder through the attic and out. We arranged them side by side on a flat section of roof, lined with black tar paper and wiring, mounds of ancient bird poop. Seth brought us two Cokes and some pretzels, and then we leaned back and waited for the Orion to zoom over our heads. The sky was clear. The air was warm. The chairs smelled like sunscreen and salt. I could feel Seth sitting next to me. I could hear him breathing near me. We didn’t talk for a long time.

Seth broke the quiet.

“Why were you being like that the other day?” he said.

I felt a rush of panic.

“Being like what?” I said.

He didn’t look at me. He sipped his Coke and set it down on the tar paper. We could hear cars whooshing past on the freeway in the distance.

“I don’t know,” he said. “You were being kind of weird at the bus stop last week.”

I felt a tightening in my chest. I gripped the metal arm of my chair.

“I wasn’t being weird,” I said. “You were.”

He was careful not to look in my direction. I was aware of his nose in profile, the left line of his jaw, one ear, one eye, as he stared straight ahead toward the mountains that rose to our east. He looked better than ever.

He cleared his throat and added: “It kind of seemed like you didn’t want anyone to talk to you.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “That’s not true at all.”

They say that humans can read each other in a hundred subtle ways, that we can detect messages in the subtlest movements of a body, in the briefest expressions of a face, but somehow, on that day, I had communicated with amazing efficiency the exact opposite of what I most wanted in the world.

“And you were all dressed up and stuff,” he went on. “Why were you so dressed up?”

I could hardly breathe, but I felt a tiny thrill. Here was proof that he’d given me some thought.

“You were the one being weird,” I said. “You didn’t even say hi.”

He turned and looked at me for the first time in several minutes. He had dark brown eyes, a thick fringe of lashes, no freckles.

“You didn’t say anything, either,” he said.

And then his mouth opened into a wide and sudden smile. I saw his front teeth were a little bit crooked.

“It was my birthday that day,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, happy birthday.”

Who knew what would happen next, but we were together for now, sipping our Cokes and looking at the sky.

“Wait,” said Seth, sitting up in his beach chair. “What time is it?”

He was the first to realize it: The Orion was overdue.