It was a long time before she became still and silent. She kept trying to swallow, the muscles in her neck rearranging themselves to accommodate the tubes. Ed threaded the tubes up through a hole at the top of the shoebox coffin, near Mom’s head. Hassan opened a drawer and pulled out a mess of electrical wires. He stuffed a bundle of brightly colored wires down the first tube, then one long black cable with a small box at the end down the second one, and finally a small rectangular black piece of plastic that looked like a solar panel attached to a fiber- optic string down the last. Hassan plugged all the wires into a little white box that Ed fixed over the hole at the top of what I realized was nothing more than an elaborate packing crate.
“Say goodbye.” I looked up, surprised at the kind voice. Ed had his back to us, typing something into a computer; it was Hassan who spoke. He nodded at me encouragingly.
Daddy had to pull my arm to make me approach Mom. This… this was not the last image of her I wanted. Yellow crusting her eyes, tubes holding wires crammed down her throat, a soft sky-blue sheen pumping through her veins. Daddy kissed her, and Mom smiled a bit around the tubes. I patted her on the shoulder. It was cold too. She gurgled something at me, and I leaned in closer. Three sounds, three spluttering grunts, really. I squeezed Mom’s arm. I knew the words she was trying to get past the tubes were, “I love you.”
“Momma,” I whispered, stroking her paper-soft skin. I’d not called her anything but Mom since I was seven.
“’Kay, that’s it,” Ed said. Daddy’s hand snaked into the crook of my elbow, and he tugged at me gently. I jerked away. He changed tactics and gripped my shoulder, spinning me against his hard, muscled chest in a tight hug, and I didn’t resist this time. Ed and Hassan lifted up what looked like a hospital’s version of a fire hose, and water flecked with sky-blue sparkles filled the shoebox coffin. Mom spluttered when it reached her nose.
“Just breathe it in,” Ed shouted over the sound of rushing liquid. “Just relax.”
A stream of bubbles shot through the blue water, obscuring her face. She shook her head, denying the water the chance to drown her, but a moment later, she gave up. The liquid covered her. Ed turned off the hose and the ripples faded. The water was still. She was still.
Ed and Hassan lowered the shoebox coffin lid over Mom. They pushed the box into the rear wall, and only when they closed it behind a little door on the wall did I notice all the little doors in the wall, like a morgue. They pulled the handle down. A hiss of steam escaped through the door — the flash freezing process was over. One second Mom was there, and the next, everything about her that made her Mom was frozen and stagnant. She was as good as dead for the next three centuries until someone opened that door and woke her up.
“The girl’s next?” Ed asked.
I stepped forward, balling my hands into fists so they wouldn’t shake.
“No,” Daddy said.
Without waiting for Daddy’s response, Ed and Hassan were already preparing another shoebox coffin. They didn’t care whether it was me or him; they were just doing their job.
“What?” I asked Daddy.
“I’m going next. Your mother wouldn’t agree to that — she thought you’d still back down, decide not to come with us. Well, I’m giving you that option. I’m going next. Then, if you’d like to walk away, not be frozen, that’s okay. I’ve told your aunt and uncle. They’re waiting outside; they’ll be there until five. After they freeze me, you can just walk away. Mom and I won’t know, not for centuries, not till we wake up, and if you do decide to live instead of being frozen, we’ll be okay.”
“But, Daddy, I—”
“No. It’s not fair for us to guilt you into this. It’ll be easier for you to make an honest decision if you do it without facing us.”
“But I promised you. I promised Mom.” My voice cracked. My eyes burned painfully, and I squeezed them shut. Two hot trails of tears leaked down my face.
“Doesn’t matter. That’s too big of a promise for us to make you keep. You have to make this choice yourself — if you want to stay here, I understand. I’m giving you a way out.”
“But they don’t need you! You could stay here with me! You’re not even important to the mission — you’re with the military, for Pete’s sake! How is a battlefield analyst supposed to help on a new planet? You could stay here, you could be—”
Daddy shook his head.
“—with me,” I whispered, but there was no point in asking him to stay. His mind was made up. And it wasn’t true, anyway. Daddy was sixth in command, and while that didn’t exactly make him commander in chief, it was still pretty high up. Mom was important too; no one was better at genetic splicing, and they needed her to help develop crops that could grow on the new planet.
I was the only one not needed.
Daddy went behind the curtain and undressed, and when he came out, Ed and Hassan let him use a hand towel to cover himself as he walked to the cryo chamber. They took it away when he lay down, and I forced my eyes to stare at his face, to not make this worse for either of us. But his face radiated pain, a look I had never seen Daddy wear before. It made my insides twist with even more fear, more doubt. I watched them plug the two IVs in. I watched them seal his eyes. I tried to retreat within myself, silence the scream of horror reverberating in my mind, and stand straight with a spine made of iron and a face made of stone. Then Daddy squeezed my hand, once, hard, as they crammed the tubes down his throat, and I crumbled, inside and out.
Before they filled his box with the blue-speckled liquid, Daddy held up his hand, his pinky finger sticking out. I wrapped my own pinky around his. I knew that with it, he was promising everything would be okay. And I almost believed him.
I cried so hard when they filled his cryo chamber up I couldn’t see his face as it drowned in the liquid. Then they lowered the lid, slammed him in his mortuary, and a puff of white steam escaped through the cracks.
“Can I see him?” I asked.
Ed and Hassan looked at each other. Hassan shrugged. Ed jerked the lever of the little door open again and pulled out the clear shoebox coffin.
And there was Daddy. The translucent liquid was frozen solid and, I knew, so was Daddy. I put my hand on the glass, wishing there was a way to feel his warmth through the ice, but snatched it away quickly. The glass was so cold it burned. Green lights blinked on the little electric box Hassan had fixed to the top of Daddy’s cryotube.
He didn’t look like Daddy under the ice.
“So,” Ed said, “are you going under, or are you leaving the party early?” He pushed Daddy’s shoebox coffin back into its little slot in the wall.
When I looked up at Ed, my eyes were so watery that his face sort of melted, and he looked a bit like a Cyclops. “I…”
My eyes slid to the exit, past all the cryo equipment on the other side of the room. Beyond that door were my aunt and uncle, who I loved, who I could be happy living with. And beyond them was Jason. And Rebecca and Heather and Robyn and all my friends. And the mountains, the flowers, the sky. Earth. Beyond that door was Earth. And life.
But my eyes drifted to the little doors on the wall. Beyond those doors were my momma and daddy.
I cried as I undressed. The first boy who ever saw me naked was Jason, just that one time, the night I found out I would leave behind everything on Earth, and everything included him. I did not like the idea that the last boys to see me naked on this planet would be Ed and Hassan. I tried to cover myself with my arms and hands, but Ed and Hassan made me remove them so they could put the IVs in.
And, oh god, it was worse than Mom made it look. Oh, God. Oh,
…
…
