normally.
Hockey was such a violent game-a boy’s game. Had the Cousins adopted it for that very reason, to go against the perception that women were soft? Eva watched Roz throw herself around the ice like a demon. What would drive such a shy girl to compete so hard?
At night she lay awake and thought about Carey. She imagined him out there on the surface, running out of air. What was it about boys and men that they always took such big risks? You couldn’t protect them.
If you tried to, they got sulky and depressed. She had never questioned the place the Cousins had prepared for boys in the world, how their aggression and desire for dominance had been thwarted and channeled.Keep your son close; let your daughter go, the homily went. Had she been fair to Carey? If she had him back with her this minute, could she keep herself from smothering him?
Jack went back to his own work: His team planted a copse of junipers, pinon, sage, and wildflowers on the east slopes of Fowler, hauling loads of their new soil that promised a better growth rate than the chemically prepared soils. He came home each night with dirt under his fingernails, scrubbed himself raw in the shower and fell into bed exhausted. Jack and Eva had not made love after that night Carey disappeared. At first Eva had no desire, and then, after her need returned and she might have felt it a comfort to have Jack hold her in his arms, he was so depressed by Carey’s loss that he would not touch her. Eva saw that worrying about her had taken Jack away from Roz.
“I’m sorry,” she vowed to Jack’s sleeping form one night. “I can do better.”
Since Carey’s disappearance, Roz spent less time at home. Eva saw the pain in Jack’s eyes as he watched Roz. She wondered what it must be like for Roz, to have this single strong male presence always there in her life. She owed Roz and Jack better than she had been giving, and the effort to engage them would help her stop thinking about Carey.
She arranged for Roz to spend her second-semester practicum in the colony’s materials cooperatives.
What to do about Jack’s relationship to Roz was harder to figure out. Eva was a physicist, and had never paid much attention to the theories of Nora Sobieski and the other founders. It wasn’t as though a man taking an interest in his daughter’s upbringing was necessarily unnatural. But Eva realized that-just like her with Carey, out of his fear of losing Roz-Jack ran the risk of smothering her.Keep your son close; let your daughter go: Whether Jack could see it or not, it was time for Roz to begin to find her own place in the world.
Jack had taken to bringing home chard and romaine lettuce and carrots from the gardens. He brought a potted juniper for the balcony where they ate their meals. There one night at dinner Eva suggested to Jack that Roz move out.
Jack looked frightened. “She’s only fourteen, Eva.”
“If she doesn’t begin to break free now she will have a much harder time later.”
“I understand that. It’s just-it’s not the way she grew up. She and I haven’t been here that long. And with-with Carey gone…” his voice trailed off.
Eva watched him. “Jack, I know I’ve been distant. I know it’s been hard for you. If you don’t want to be alone with me, I’ll understand. I just hope you won’t live with Roz.”
“For pity’s, Eva! Don’t you believe in love?”
She was taken aback. “Of course I do.” She poked her fork at her salad.
“Well, I love Roz. I love…I love you.”
Eva felt out of her depth. What did he mean when he said the word “love”? She looked into Jack’s handsome face: blue eyes, curly blond hair, square jaw. How much, when he looked so hurt, he reminded her of Carey. Jack watched her intently. He was trying to communicate something, but she had no idea what it was.
“I know you love us,” Eva said. “That’s not the question. But if Roz is ever going to fit in here, she needs to begin to network…I might even say the same for you.”
“Network.” He sat still as a stone.
He acted so wounded; he was putting her on the spot. Was this about sex? “I’m not trying to push you away, Jack. It’s not me who’s been turning away every night in bed.”
“I realize that,” he said defensively. “I thought that you were still grieving for Carey.”
God, she was no good at this interpersonal stuff. She looked away. She tried the salad grown from the gardens he and his team had planted. “Let me handle my grief in my own way,” she said.
He said nothing. He seemed more sad than angry. They ate in silence. After a while he asked her, “How’s the salad?”
“The best I’ve ever tasted. And the pine nuts-are they from the new trees?”
“Yes,” he said.
“The juniper smells wonderful.”
“It’s yours,” he said. “I grew it for you.”
Transformation When Roz told Jack about Carey’s plans to meet the First Imprints Club, Jack picked up Carey’s pressure suit. He laid the suit on the floor, adjusted it so that the locator lay flat against the concrete, and ground his heel into it until the chip snapped. “OK,” Jack said. “You take his things and lose them some place on the surface where they’ll never be found.”
Roz knew that Jack’s real reason for rushing her out was to keep her from seeing him dispose of Carey’s body. She did not object. She stuffed Carey’s clothes into the suit, sealed it up and, while her father turned back to the body, headed for the airlock.
“Wait,” Jack said, “take this.”
Fearfully, she turned. Jack had taken something from Carey’s hand. It was Carey’s ring.
She shoved the ring inside her own suit, then hurried through the airlock onto the lunar surface.
The shadows of lunar afternoon lay precisely as they had when she had entered the lab an hour before, a girl seeking to apologize to her dad. Between then and now, something had broken.
Jack had looked so surprised, so guilty-so old. The skin beneath his eyes was dark and papery, as if he hadn’t slept in a week. Had he looked this tired when she had argued with him in the plaza? It made her wonder just what had been going on all this time. How could Jack kill Carey? Had he been so near to breaking all along? As she shuffled across the humped, dusty surface, Roz fought to keep from crying again at the awfulness of Carey’s death and the precariousness of their situation.
For most of her life, it had been just her and her father. Roz’s mother Helen had been a graduate student in plant pathology when Jack met her at Purdue. Roz’s first memory was of sitting in the bathtub as her mom taught her to count on her toes. When Roz was six, her mother’s increasing bouts of depression broke up the marriage. Helen had custody of Roz for more than a year before Jack rescued her, and Roz remembered that year vividly: afternoons hanging out with the kids in the neighboring apartment, suppers of corn flakes, Helen coming back from her classes unhappy, Roz trying to wake Helen to get her to work in the mornings, Helen shouting at Jack every time he came to pick Roz up for visits. When Jack had stolen Roz away, though he never said anything bad about Helen, Roz felt that she would never miss her mother again.
Now Roz wished she knew where Helen was, what she was doing at just that moment. What had she gone through when she was fourteen? Nothing as bad as this.
As she moved away from Fowler across the lunar surface, Roz tried to stay to the shadows. But there was little chance of anyone spotting her. What she needed to do was lose Carey’s suit somewhere that nobody was likely to find it for thirty or forty years.
It should not be so hard. These were the rumpled highlands, a landscape of hills, ridges, craters, and ejecta. Around the colony the ground was scuffed with a million bootprints. Roz hid hers among them, bouncing along below the eastern rim of Fowler.
She then struck off along a side track of footprints that aimed northeast. A couple of kilometers along, she broke off from the path and made a long leap to a rock scarp uncovered with dust. She landed clumsily but safe, and left no boot marks. She proceeded in this direction for some distance, aiming herself from rock to rock to leave as few footprints as possible. The short horizon made Roz feel as if she was a bug on a plate, nearing the edge of the world. She kept her bearings by periodically noting some point ahead and behind so that she would not get lost. That was the biggest danger of surface hopping, and the source of the rule against ever doing it alone. It would be easy to explain Carey’s disappearance as an intoxicated boy getting lost and running out of air. A broken radio, a faulty locator.
A kilometer on, Roz found a pit behind a group of ejecta boulders. Deep in the shadow on the north side of the largest, she dug away the top layer of regolith and stuffed the suit into the pit. She shoved the dirt back over the
