Shine Shine Shine

25

At 2:30 in the morning, the phone next to Sunny’s bed rang. It was NASA. She should come in right away. Communications with the rocket had been established, and there was a video uplink. The men were alive. They were well. She could talk to Maxon, see him, hear him talk. She pulled on some clothes, kissed Bubber awake and dressed him, and bundled them both out the door and into the van. There she sat, blinking, at her reflection in the rearview mirror. She was about to send a love letter with no words in it at all. She set off toward the Langley Research Center, where they would be waiting for her.

* * *

AT THREE O’CLOCK IN the morning, the mother’s heart fluttered. It fluttered and faded. Then it resumed operating, but at an unsteady pace. The kidneys had been gone for hours, the liver dead, the blood full of toxins. Underneath her body, her mind was racing. In the room, under the flat sheet, there was no change. The orange light of the parking-lot fixtures filtered through the shade like morning sun through the shell of an egg. A nurse had come in, hours ago, and felt for a pulse. Now the room was silent.

To say that the mother did not resume consciousness just before death would be wrong. It would be something that was said to palliate the people who maybe should have been there for the death. She did not resume the symptoms of consciousness: the fluttering eyelid, the squeezing hand, the gentle nod. But she did resume the awareness that she was dying. And she fought with death. All by herself, in the dark, with nothing to help her control the encroaching darkness inside her, she fought against her own failing blood and the terrible things in it that were at work against her. She fought to live.

In her mind, she was standing at a roadside vegetable stand in Pennsylvania. She was picking over tomatoes, wondering if they could really be local, because they looked so perfect. There was a kid there operating the stand, the same age as Sunny and from the same 4-H club. A car swished down the highway, disturbing the air around the vegetables, a thrush whirred somewhere in the woods back away from the road. She could hear the locusts at their songs in between passing cars. It was late summer, late afternoon, and the warm last rays of the sun slanted across the valley.

The kid was looking at her. She said, “Mrs. Butcher?” Emma remembered clearly the electrified feeling in her body when the kid said, “Do you know where Sunny is right now?”

“Where is Sunny?” Emma said, setting one of her tomatoes back into the bin.

“Um, I’m probably not supposed to tell you.”

“Well, is she in danger?” Emma’s finger pressed a hole into a tomato, then another hole into the same tomato, giving the tomato a little girdle of holes.

“Hmm,” said the kid, sucking her braces. “Yeah, probably.”

Emma in the hospital, static under the blankets, unable to move her arms or make a fist, remembered the desire to throttle this pimply, damp child in her denim short-shorts, to strangle her with her own straggly braid.

“Maggie,” said Emma. “You need to tell me right now where Sunny is. Otherwise I am going to be very angry, and tell your father.”

“Well,” said Maggie, drawing out the word. “I guess it is in Sunny’s best interest if I tell you.”

“Tell me.”

Emma’s teeth ground together, in the hospital bed, by the roadside stand. Where is my child? What is going to happen to her? Fix it, fix it, fix it.

“Uh, Mrs. Butcher, you know the Belmar bridge?”

Emma was gone. She ran to the car, slammed herself into it, and gunned out of the little roadside area, spraying gravel behind her. She knew the Belmar bridge. For three generations, the youth of Yates County had been daring each other to jump off it, and infrequently dying under it. A railroad trestle over the Allegheny River, the Belmar bridge was legendary, its stone pylons driving down thickly into the river, its rusted and inflexible beams rising high above. The kids would climb out to the center pylon, reaching it by means of the rusted rungs of a service ladder, and lie in the sun there, high above the water. The bravest of them would leap off the platform and into the water, almost forty feet below. The Allegheny is a shallow river, but the construction of the bridge and the current in that spot had left a deep eddy just downstream of that huge middle pylon, so if you held your body just right, and hit the water correctly, you could dive down safely, and not get hurt. Or, like several kids over the years, you could kill yourself trying.

Okay, she told herself. To be fair. To be truthful. Those kids were drunk. Sunny wouldn’t drink. Those kids were stupid. Sunny is smart. Probably she won’t even climb out there. She would know how mad I’d be if I found out. She would have some sense. She would not do this. She would not jump off this bridge. It was a rite of passage, the neighbors had told them over dinner one night, for the local youths. The neighbors’ children had not done it, though. The sensible, smart neighbors’ children had grown up and gone and had not jumped off that bridge at all. The most impressive railroad trestle in three counties. Emma could just picture it. Her skin burned.

She sped down the two-lane highway with no regard for traffic, drifting into the opposite lane on curves to the right, drifting onto the shoulder on curves to the left. The beautiful late-afternoon sun on the countryside had become the fires of hell burning her. She knew that Sunny could not die, and she knew that she could stop her. She could say, “Sunny, STOP.” The bald head would whip around, the girl would wave, turn, and she would sheepishly shrug, let some other kid do it, let some other kid jump off that platform for her.

If only she were with some more sensible boy. Maxon would just let her go, just let her do it, whatever she wanted. He was enslaved to her, and he was hopeless, too damaged, she could not trust him with Sunny’s life. She could not believe that he could keep her safe, not just by thinking about it. Why could she not love some optimistic clod who would tell her the truth, keep her out of trouble, and become a banker? That type of kid would never let her break her neck on a river rock. Never.

At the bottom of the hill, she opened the door and began to run, leaving the car open behind her. Her long skirt beat against her legs and her feet kicked up gravel behind her. Her mind demanded she stay alive. She took a shuddering gasp and let it out, shifting the blankets just a little. She felt the crushing weight of her own ribs, felt that no more breath would come in. Maybe that was her last breath. Maybe it was over. She was done. But it couldn’t be. She had to run, she had to find out. So she dragged another breath in, her pulse jumping up in her neck, one gulping swallow of air as her throat collapsed, enough to keep her alive until she could see her child safe, until she could see Sunny and tell her “Don’t jump off that fucking bridge.”

Her legs carried her like the wind, over the gravel road and then onto the railroad ties, leaping from plank to plank between the place where the rails used to be. She felt no pain, she felt only suffocation. She felt her blood, incapable of doing its job. She felt her mind shutting her off. Don’t tell the feet, she thought. Let them keep running. At last she turned the corner and saw the bridge, its dark brown trapezoids rising against that bright blue sky.

“Sunny,” she tried to cry, but there was no air. Her lungs were finished. They could not do it, not even one more time. Her chest contracted. Her cells struggled. She hung on the nearest beam, clung to it, thrusting her head out over the water, straining to see. There were the kids. Was Sunny alone? No, Maxon was already in the water. Bastard. He had probably worked out all the angles and trajectories. He had probably told her just the right way to jump. It wasn’t fair. She had probably demanded it. She would, she was always trying to be like the other children. How much this would mean to her, poor bald Sunny, with her awful baldness, to jump off the Belmar bridge just like the other kids did, to talk about it later, over sodas at the Jolly Milk, sitting on the roof of someone’s car, a gang of kids, a group of friends, and Maxon hanging back, driving for her, working out the math for her, silent when she told him to be silent, letting her kill herself to fit in.

Sunny was there, poised. The mother tried to gasp out a warning, gasp out a final endearment. Sunny, I love you. But there was no air, and there was no blood, and the blackness came down from on top of her head and shut her down. In the reverie, she hung there, her body limp and crumpled against a beam. In reality, she died there, in the hospital bed, and went into the dark. Her brain stopped working and that was it, just at the wrong moment. One minute there were electrochemical processes inside the skull. The next minute there were not. No one shared it, no one eased it to its end, and no one could have prevented it. It just happened. A death happened at 3:12 in the morning. A private death between the mother and herself, before she