Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

“That’s not what I want to do,” Keith had said in response.

“Well, it’s your choice,” his father had answered. “Just my two cents.”

Now they were both gone. In the years that followed he would miss them, especially his mother, who had been one of the only demonstrably affectionate people he had known in his childhood, although he certainly bonded with many of his teachers and managed, despite everything, to have a few brief relationships with girls. His mother had been concerned about his approach to the world, though, and after she passed there had been no one to dissuade him of the notion that his fulfillment would come from work and numbers and not from human interaction. Had it not been for Barb he might have simply drifted away into that world; he certainly had the capacity to do so.

He thought that he should pick Quinn up at school, that the news of her grandfather’s death was something he should tell her straightaway, although when he actually arrived there and asked to take her out of class early he was less sure of his decision and when she arrived in the school office he lost his resolve to tell her anything at all.

“I thought we could go out and do something fun,” he said. It was the only explanation he could think of and he was relieved that she agreed to go with him for somehow he thought she might refuse and return to her classroom.

“Mommy’s coming home soon,” he said when they were in the car.

“Why?” she said. “Is Grandpa dead now?” She looked so small in the rearview mirror, staring out the passenger-side window at the street.

“Do you want me to tell you right now?” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

He did not answer for a long while. Then he said, “Yes, honey. Grandpa died yesterday.”

“Crap,” she said.

He nodded, although she was not looking at him. “Crap,” he said in agreement.

“Did it hurt?”

“No, it didn’t hurt. Mommy said he couldn’t breathe very well so she said now that he’s gone he can breathe better.”

“Because he’s in heaven.”

“That’s right.”

I-675 turned toward the east in a long, lazy curve. He could see horses in a distant pasture. Tract homes here and there amongst the fields. She continued to stare out the window. “You want to go to a movie or something?” he said at last.

She did not answer for a long time. Then, finally, she said, “I just want to go home.”

Again he looked at her, at the road scrolling out before him, back to her again. “Me too,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

“Tell Mommy to come home too.”

“I will,” he said. In that moment he could think of nothing he wanted more. The interstate beyond the windshield: signs passing, cars moving all around him.

“This isn’t the right way,” she said at last.

“I know,” he said.

She was silent again, this time for a long, long while. Then she said, simply, “OK.”

They continued to drive like that, not speaking. He could see the twinned vectors of their forward motion where they pushed toward the horizon, curving not along the interstate upon which they rode but up and out and away. He might have believed that the lines calculated a single path for them both, father and daughter. Would we not all believe such a thing about our families, our children, ourselves? Even as the perfect lines continued: not parallel or convergent but rather diverging so subtly their distance would be impossible to mark or measure, the lines moving away, moving away from each other. A few zeroes past the decimal and everything is changed. A ten thousandth. A hundred thousandth. A repetition. A vinculum. And you would not find their intersection even were you to plot those thin vectors for all your days to come.

During dinner, Nicole continually peppered him with questions, all of which he answered between mouthfuls of food. Occasionally Jennifer would say something, asking her daughter to let him eat or insisting that some questions were not to be asked in polite company. He said he did not mind, although some questions — questions about his separation from Barb — he answered vaguely enough so that his words amounted to no answer at all. He assumed that Nicole’s parents had divorced, took this to be the reason why she asked so many questions about the topic, but he did not ask Jennifer if this was the case. Perhaps later she would tell him what had happened. Or perhaps it was irrelevant.

The interior of Jennifer’s house was shockingly similar to the way his own wife had decorated their home, the way it had looked before he had left for the mission, and the similarities made him uneasy. The blinds were down and curtains covered the windows. Dried flower arrangements here and there. A giant wreath over the fireplace. Photographs of Nicole at various ages. Impersonal knickknacks. It was as if she had found a page in a magazine and had taken that page to one of the megastores and had bought everything pictured: particleboard angles and curves, gauzy window dressings.

He had been anticipating the dinner for most of the day, mostly because he did not really understand what would be expected of him. The anxiety he felt and the similarities in decor had very nearly turned him away at the front door but Jennifer had touched his arm just at that moment and led him farther into the house, toward the dining room and its table of food. But even when he was seated, something about the whole situation felt wrong to him: this woman and her daughter seeming so similar to everything he had lost and yet here they were, as if surrogates or doppelgängers that had appeared in a house nearly identical to his own.

And there was Nicole, a little girl asking him questions about his mission when his own daughter never again would do so. He had agreed to field the questions but now that he was here he had no desire to talk about what he had done, at least not in the beginning, when he found himself wishing he were back in the empty house across the street, back in the cocoon of his solitude and his loneliness. But he did not rise from the table. Not during the first five minutes, nor the next five. Each time he looked up, the little girl was waiting for another answer and each time he glanced across to Jennifer he found her staring at him, her eyes wide and her body inclining toward him as if hanging on his every word, and such attention drove all other thoughts from his mind. He would catch her eyes momentarily and she would not break the contact and each time he felt a flutter of warmth run through him and the feeling that he was an impostor in a house of ghosts began to fade. There was a simple logic to the questions, requiring of him only a basic rendering of the story of his mission and of his experience, the questions specific and blunt: “How did you go to the bathroom?” and “What was the best thing to eat?” and “Did you get to watch TV?”

He told her about the installation of the robotic arm and subsequent “windshield wiper maneuver” by using his fork, a piece of French bread stuck to the tines, and his lasagna-smeared dinner plate as the surface of the space station, his fork swinging across the plate in a long smooth motion. There and back again.

When he had finished she said, “That doesn’t seem like much.”

“I guess not,” he said. “But no one had ever done it before.”

“Was it dangerous?”

“Probably.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t.”

“Well, which was it?”

He looked up at Jennifer for a moment and she winked at him, a gesture that made him shiver. “It’s always dangerous doing a space walk,” he said. “Things can go wrong.”