She picks her way back across the band of seaweed and driftwood, regains the beach. She turns to look back across the ice. In Seattle, when she wondered if she was play-acting, she felt self-disgust. But maybe she needed to play-act in order to discover how she really felt. Her mother would understand. She’s also reminded of something her father once told her about his own father, this Vernon fellow. Vernon liked to say (her father said) that if you’re ever unsure about a choice, the smart thing to do is flip a coin, because the moment the coin is in the air you know which way you want it to fall.
She walks back east along the shore. The sun is about to rise. She’s hungry. Maybe the old man forgot to tell her to eat first, maybe she’s confusing hunger for life with hunger for a french fry. As she approaches the mill, there’s a moment when a sail catches sunlight on its tip at the top of its sweep, then thirty seconds later the whole face of the building is lit and across the ice and water the top edge of the sun blazes in her eye. She doesn’t really want to talk to the old man, but she should at least say goodbye.
As she comes around the side of the mill he sticks his head out the door. “Breakfast is ready.” He waves her triumphantly up the steps. Inside, there’s fresh coffee, eggs, oatmeal, yogurt, biscuits, butter, cheese. The table is set for two.
Of course he would win either way. If she came back, she’d be amazed at his foreknowledge, and if she didn’t, who would know? Lila would never tell.
He stands beside her, beaming as though he gives a shit whether she lives or dies, as though by “predicting” her survival he somehow conjured it, and now her life is his. She turns on her heel. “Goodbye, old man.” She goes back down the stairs and keeps on along the path through the marsh.
He calls after her, “I called from the depot last night when I went to buy coffee. I left a message for your mother. She’s probably on her way here. You don’t want her to travel all this way for nothing, do you?” Mette keeps walking. He calls again, “Don’t prove all the people right who say that those who contemplate suicide are selfish!” But his voice is already fainter.
New cloudbanks move in as she crosses the island, and by the time she arrives at the landing, the sun is gone. So is the morning ferry, which is fifty yards from the slip and chugging in the wrong direction. The afternoon ferry doesn’t leave for seven hours. The little depot, which Mette would call a convenience store, opens at 9:00 a.m. In addition to basic supplies and a wide array of candy, it serves simple hot-food items, including french fries. Mette polishes off a greasy basketful, then tries the soft-serve ice cream. Reads Newman and Wishner at one of the two Formica-topped tables. She keeps expecting to look up and see the old man coming down the road waving a wand at her. But presumably he’s the type who rejects you so fast after you reject him that later nobody can remember the order.
If her mother’s on the way, she probably sent a text, but Mette hasn’t bothered to download the app that would let her access it. Or maybe she’s trying to sneak up on her, worried she’ll move farther off if she sees the butterfly net. There always has to be so much drama.
She gets on the 3:30 ferry with the one other passenger—could it be the same woman?—and stands in the back and watches the island recede. She would like to put the old man out of her thoughts, but is finding it difficult. It annoys her that for all his cheap tricks to impress her, he actually did impress her. Still, he will fade, since she has no intention of ever seeing him again. Alex will be harder.
The ferry arrives at the quaint half-timbered town at 4:30. The train station is a fifteen-minute walk away, and there’s a train back to Copenhagen at 5:02. Mette buys a ticket at the kiosk. There are only two platforms. Mette stands on one of them, and at 4:55, a train from Copenhagen stops along the other. After a few moments of humming and hissing, it slides to the left like a piece of stage scenery, and behind it she sees, among the crowd of dispersing passengers, a tall thin man and a short curvy woman standing together, the man looking lost, the woman getting her bearings. Her parents.
July 4, 2016
Data Set: Echo
To S. W. on her birthday—left off the margin of a yearbook twenty-two years ago
My father used to go out into the yard at night to watch Echo cross the sky.
The year was 1960.
I was a baby inside the house, with my mother.
My mother was the one who had wanted to be an astronomer.
• • •
Echo was the world’s first communications satellite.
It was a balloon of aluminum-coated Mylar, 100 feet in diameter.
It was beautiful, looking like a perfect sphere of solid silver.
On August 12, 1960, a microwave transmission from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, was bounced off Echo and successfully received at the Bell Labs horn antenna in Holmdel, New Jersey.
The United States wanted to change international law to allow satellites, unlike airplanes, to fly over foreign countries.
Highlighting a non-military purpose for satellites would help establish this new legal right.
Echo transmitted the first ever live voice communication by satellite, a message from President Eisenhower: “This is one more significant step in the United States’ program of space research and exploration being carried forward for peaceful purposes.”
Echo provided the United States with more-accurate
