Scarecrow

The coat was crooked again in the morning.

I fixed it. Then I stood in the wheat a while longer than I needed to, because the house behind me was quiet in the wrong way.

Mother had a bad night.

I’d heard it through the wall, around two. Not loud. She was never loud. Just the cough, over and over, and then a long silence that was worse than the cough, and then the cough again. I’d lain there with my eyes open and counted the seconds in the silences. The longest one was forty-one.

At three I’d gone and sat outside her door. I didn’t go in. She didn’t like us to see her like that, and she always knew when we were there anyway.

”Go to bed, Lucas,” she’d said through the wood, very gently, around half past.

I hadn’t. She hadn’t said it again.

She was awake when I brought the eggs up. Paler than yesterday. Her hair had been brushed. Garnet had done it, I found out later, at six in the morning, standing on a chair, and had made two very small braids on the left side and run out of patience on the right.

”You sat outside my door,” Mother said.

”I was passing.”

”For an hour.”

”I passed slowly.”

She almost laughed. It turned into a cough, a small one, and she waved me off before I could move.

I put the plate down and sat in the chair by the window. The chair was Father’s. He’d made it out of the old porch rail, and it creaked in exactly one place, under the left arm. I put my arm there on purpose.

”I want you to do something for me tonight,” Mother said.

”Anything.”

”Don’t say anything. Your father used to say anything, and then I’d ask him to fix the gutters.” She turned her head on the pillow to look at me. ”Garnet asked for the moon story.”

”I promised her.”

”I know. I heard.” She paused. ”I want you to tell it properly. In here, with all of us. The whole thing.”

”I always tell the whole thing.”

”You tell the part where you were four and clever. You never tell the part about your father.”

I didn’t say anything.

She was right. I’d told the twins the moon story maybe fifty times. Garnet loved it, the way she loved any story where something impossible happened and nobody got hurt. Genny pretended she was too old for it and then corrected me every time I got a detail wrong. But I always told it the same way. A boy, a book, a question, a lake. I stopped before the part where it went wrong.

”Tonight,” Mother said. ”After supper. All of it.”

”Why?”

She looked at the window, at the gray morning, at the wheat moving down in the field.

”Because I’d like to hear it,” she said. ”Once more. The way it happened.”

I understood what she meant.

I said I would.

I spent the afternoon in Father’s study with the medical books.

There were eleven of them. Father had pulled them out of a collapsed clinic in the old suburbs the year before he died, when his own cough started, and had read every one of them cover to cover at the kitchen table at night. Some of the margins had his handwriting in them. Most of it was chemistry. Some of it wasn’t. On the inside cover of the thickest one, in pencil, very small, he’d written Dot — find out first.

He hadn’t found out. He’d run out of time.

I opened it to the page I’d marked last week and started again.

I knew the words for what was happening to Mother. The modification had rewritten the cells in her body to do things cells were never meant to do: reach out, hold, lift. They’d been built to burn bright. Nobody had built them to stop burning, and now they were burning through everything else. Her lungs. Her heart. The marrow of her bones.

I understood that much. I could have drawn it.

What I didn’t understand was the next step. What exactly the cells were doing wrong, molecule by molecule, and what the right thing would be instead. The books had been written before the war, about ordinary people. None of them had a chapter for her.

I could change anything I could see. I could have looked at Mother and turned every cell in her body into something else.

But I didn’t know what to turn them into. And if I guessed—

I’d seen what happened when I guessed. I’d been four, and a whole lake had gone white in a second.

I read until the light through the study window turned orange. Then Genny came and stood in the doorway.

She didn’t say anything. She looked at the book open on the desk, then at me, then at the stack of the other ten beside it, every one of them bristling with my paper markers.

”You’ve read those,” she said.

”I’m reading them again.”

”Why?”

Because I might have missed something. Because Father might have missed something. Because if I sat here long enough with the right page in front of me, maybe it would finally make sense, and I could go upstairs and fix it, and none of what was coming would have to come.

”Studying,” I said.

Genny looked at me for a long moment with Mother’s eyes.

Then she came in, took the second-thickest book off the stack, sat on the floor with her back against the desk, and opened it to the first page.

She didn’t understand most of it. She was nine. She read it anyway, frowning, moving her lips over the long words, until Garnet called us both down to supper.

After supper Genny floated two kitchen chairs up the stairs without being asked, which was the closest she’d come in a month to admitting she knew something was wrong.

Garnet climbed onto the foot of the bed and sat cross-legged with her chin in her hands. Genny took one of the chairs and turned it backward and sat with her arms folded on top of it, wearing the expression of a girl who was only here because her chair was. I opened the window. The night came in cool and smelled like wheat.

The moon was coming up over the ridge.

”Once upon a time,” Garnet prompted.

”It’s not a fairy tale.”

”It’s better than a fairy tale. It’s true.”

”Once upon a time,” I said, ”I was four.”

Garnet sighed with deep happiness.

”Father had found a book in the ruins at the old highway. A children’s book about space. Most of the pages were water-stained, but the one about the moon was fine. It had a big gray picture, all craters, and underneath it said The Moon has no air and no water.”

”No liquid water,” said Genny.

”That’s what it said. I’m telling you what it said.”

”It was wrong. There’s ice at the poles. In the craters that never get sun.”

”I know there is now. I didn’t know then. I was four. I could barely read.” I looked at Mother. ”Can I tell the story?”

”I’m enjoying it so far,” said Mother.

”I read that line about fifty times,” I said. ”No air and no water. And I didn’t like it. I thought it was the saddest thing I’d ever heard. A whole world up there in the sky, and nothing on it. Not even a puddle.”

”I’d be sad too,” said Garnet.

”So at supper I asked Father. I said, Is there water on the moon? And he said no.”

”He said ’not really,’” Mother put in quietly. ”He said ’not really, buddy,’ and then he went back to his soup.”

I hadn’t remembered that. I sat with it for a second.

”Not really,” I said. ”So after supper I went up to my room. That room. The one Garnet’s in now. And the moon was in the window, the way it is tonight, and I looked at it for a long time. And I thought, well, it should have some.”

Garnet’s eyes were enormous. She’d heard it fifty times. It didn’t matter.

”So I gave it some.”

I tried to tell it the way it had felt.

I didn’t know any chemistry then. I didn’t know what moon dust was made of. I didn’t know that most of it was oxygen already, locked up in rock, or that you’d have to make the hydrogen out of something else. I didn’t know any of the words.

I just knew what water was. I’d been drinking it my whole life. I knew what it looked like and what it felt like, and in some way I’ve never been able to explain to anyone, I knew what it was. I looked at the moon and I found a flat gray place on it, and I told the gray place to be that instead.

And it was.

”For about one second,” I said, ”there was a lake on the moon.”

I’d seen it. I still remember it better than almost anything. A dark, round patch on the gray, catching the light differently. It was water. It was my water. I had put it there.

”And then it went white.”

This was the part I didn’t tell.

Garnet sat up a little. Genny’s arms tightened on the back of the chair.

”All at once,” I said. ”Like a flash. Like someone had thrown flour on it. And I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. I thought I’d broken it. I thought I’d killed it.”

”You were four,” said Garnet, outraged on my behalf.

”I was four. So I did what you do when you’re four.”

”You cried,” said Genny.

”I screamed,” I said. ”I screamed the house down.”

”He came up those stairs three at a time,” Mother said.

She’d been quiet for most of it, her head turned on the pillow toward the window. Now she was looking at me.

”Your father. I was in the kitchen and he was on the porch, and we both heard you. And I’ve never seen him move like that. Not even in the war. He went past me so fast the teapot fell over.”

”I don’t remember that.”

”You wouldn’t. You were busy screaming.” She smiled a little. ”He thought someone had found us. He thought someone was in the house. He came through your door with his hands up and the air in the room going strange, the way it did when he was ready to change something, and there was nobody there. Just you, standing at the window, pointing at the moon.”

I remembered that part. Father in the doorway. The way the air had felt, like the moment before lightning. The way it had gone soft again when he saw me.

”I said, It went white,” I said.

”You said, I made a lake and it went white,” Mother corrected. ”Over and over. And your father looked out the window, and he looked for a long time. And then he sat down on the floor.”

”Why’d he sit down?” asked Garnet.

Mother didn’t answer right away.

”Because his legs stopped working, I think,” she said finally. ”For a moment.”

The room was very quiet. Out in the field, the wind moved the wheat.

”He knew what he was looking at,” Mother said. ”He could do almost anything. You know that. But he couldn’t have done that. Not from a bedroom. Not that far. Nobody could. Nobody in the war, not on either side. And his four-year-old son had done it because he thought the moon looked lonely.”

”What did he say?” Genny asked.

She’d unfolded her arms. She was leaning forward over the back of the chair, and she’d forgotten to look bored.

I’d never told this part. I found I remembered it perfectly.

”He got up off the floor,” I said, ”and he picked me up and sat me on the windowsill, so we were both looking at it. And he said, You didn’t break it. It froze.”

”Why’d it freeze?” asked Garnet.

”That’s what I asked.”

Father had pointed at the moon. I could still feel his arm around me, the rough sleeve of the coat that was out on the scarecrow now.

”He said water needs air pushing down on it to stay water. Here, there’s a whole sky sitting on top of every puddle, holding it down. Up there, there’s nothing. So the second the water got there, it started boiling away into nothing. And boiling takes heat, and the water used up all its own heat doing it, and what was left froze solid. All in a second.”

”It boiled and froze?” said Garnet.

”At the same time.”

”That’s not fair.”

”That’s what I said.”

”And then he said,” Mother went on softly, ”If you’re going to do things like that, buddy, you’re going to have to know what you’re doing.”

I nodded.

”The next morning he got out his notebooks. All of them. The ones I’ve been teaching you from.” I looked at Genny. ”He started with water. What it’s made of. Why it boils. Why it freezes. He said I was never to change a thing again until I understood what it was and what it would do after.”

”And did you?”

”Mostly.”

”The blue eggs,” said Genny.

”The blue eggs were an experiment.”

Garnet giggled. Mother smiled at the ceiling. For a moment it was just a story again, the way I usually told it.

Then Mother said, very quietly, almost to herself, ”He was so frightened.”

I looked at her.

”Not of you,” she said quickly. ”Never of you. He loved you more than his own life. He was frightened for you. He sat up all that night, after you were asleep, on the porch, looking at it. And when I came out he said—”

She stopped.

”Said what?”

”Nothing, love.” She closed her eyes. ”Another time.”

I wanted to push. I didn’t. She looked so tired.

I filed it away, the way Father taught me to file away anything I didn’t understand yet. Another time.

”Is it still there?” Garnet asked. ”The ice?”

”Look.”

She scrambled off the bed and climbed onto the windowsill, the same windowsill, and pressed her nose to the glass. The moon had cleared the ridge. And there on its face, a little left of center, was the spot. Small. White. Brighter than everything around it, because ice throws back light and dust swallows it.

It had been up there thirteen years.

It had never melted. It never would, Father said. Not out there. It would sit in that cold for longer than any of us were alive.

”Is there anything living in it?” Garnet asked.

”No.”

”Could there be fish? Under the ice?”

I opened my mouth. Then I shut it.

Thirteen years. A thousand chemistry lessons. I had thought about that ice a hundred different ways, how thick it was, what it was sitting on, whether the dust around it had changed. Not once had I thought about putting anything in it.

”I didn’t think of fish,” I said.

Garnet turned around on the windowsill and looked at me as if I’d told her I’d forgotten my own name.

”Lucas.”

”They’d die,” said Genny.

We both looked at her.

”They would,” she said. She frowned up at the moon, the same frown she’d given the salt in the east field. ”It’s frozen all the way through. You’d need water under the ice, not ice all the way down. So you’d need heat underneath to keep it liquid. And air for them to breathe in the water. And food, and light, and they’d have to be able to stand it being cold forever.” She paused. ”And you’d have to get the fish there without them going white like the lake did.”

I stared at her.

She was nine. I’d been teaching her from Father’s notebooks for a year. Somewhere in that year she’d stopped repeating things back to me and started thinking them.

”That’s right,” I said.

”I know it’s right.”

”Then make it work,” said Garnet, to me, as if it were very simple. ”Learn it. Learn all of it. And then put fish there.”

I looked at Mother.

”When you understand it well enough,” Mother said, without opening her eyes, ”that nothing up there would suffer for it. Then you may put fish on the moon.”

”Promise,” said Garnet.

I was always making promises to Garnet. She was the only person I’d ever met who could make them feel easy.

”Promise,” I said.

The twins fell asleep in Mother’s room, as they had most nights that month. Garnet on the foot of the bed. Genny in the chair, still sitting backward, her head on her folded arms. I put a blanket on each of them.

When I turned to go, Mother caught my wrist.

Her grip had no strength in it at all. I stopped anyway.

”He was proud of it,” she said. ”The ice. He never told you, did he?”

”No.”

”He was so proud. After he stopped being frightened. He used to go out to the field at night, after you were in bed, and stand by that silly scarecrow and look at it. He said it was the only thing anyone in our family had ever made that nobody could take away.”

She let go of my wrist.

”Leave the window open,” she said. ”I want to see it.”

I left the window open.

I went downstairs and out onto the porch, and then down into the wheat, all the way to the middle of the field. The scarecrow stood with its arms out and its faded face turned up to the sky, like it had been looking at the same thing for years.

I stood next to it and looked up.

The ice was very bright tonight. White and small and stubborn, sitting in the cold where a four-year-old had put it, never melting, never going anywhere.

Garnet was right. It was pretty.

I still hadn’t thought of fish.

I started thinking about them then.