Drown #7.6: origin stories

July 2085. Stephanie Nova and Justin Kim are 25, Jeremiah Day is 28. Lucy Harris is 19, Violet Deppiesse is 55.


In this full house, Stephanie's bedroom was one rare place where she and Justin could steal a moment of quiet together. Only a moment, probably, before one of the girls came bursting in or her parents came knocking. They had about an hour once he was home from work on Tuesdays and Thursdays before he had to leave again for guard duty at the road. Each family in the neighborhood took two six-hour shifts each week, and since Justin was the only member of their household that wasn't a child or elderly, pregnant or half-blind or minding a thousand children, it usually fell on him. He didn't mind, though. It was boring most of the time, but their neighborhood was one of the safest places in town because of it.

Then, just as they thought they might mess around for a few minutes before he had to go, Stephanie's phone rang. She didn’t answer it, but they both knew who it was. Since she lived with almost everyone she knew and all of her daycare kids had stopped being dropped off, she didn't get phone calls from that many people anymore.

"He’ll be mad," Justin said.

"Not as long as I call him back before he tries a second time," she said.

"Yeah, well, what is that? Like five minutes from now?"




Justin didn’t like it when Jeremiah called, how often Jeremiah called, how Stephanie needed to drop everything and pay complete attention to him, how Jeremiah would make her feel if she didn't pay attention to him just the right way. It was very off-putting. And Jeremiah always seemed to have impeccable timing for knowing exactly when they’d want to spend time together.

"I think this is his last day on base. He's getting ready to go out on a mission."

"I can’t wait. … I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say that. Maybe you look forward to his phone calls?"

She didn't respond one way or another.

"It’s okay," he said. "I need to pee and grab a shower and get out to the road by four. Go ahead, call your husband back."

"Don’t say it like that."

"I’m just saying it like it is."

Justin showered quickly and came back. He started to dress, but she stopped him for a kiss.


"You’re not helping me get dressed," he said.

"I know, I just needed to get that frown off your face. It worked." She handed him his shirt. "I’ll bring your dinner out to the road later, if you want."

"Okay, that sounds nice."

"Don't be mad."


He hugged her tight. "I'm not mad," he said. There were more accurate words for how Justin felt—frustrated, disappointed, sad—but not mad. Not at her, anyway.

—

Stephanie called her husband back.

His phone calls lately had not been entirely stressful, besides the fact of their happening at all. He was about to go out on a mission that would last two weeks, his first mission since arriving at the lunar base. It would feel like a vacation for Stephanie, and the idea of that made her feel like a terrible, terrible person. "Since we can’t get through them without them shooting back, they’re testing low-orbit flybys to see if we can attack them from above. It’ll be dangerous," he told her.

"Well, be careful, okay?"

"Sure, I will. Will you worry?"

"Of course we will," she said.

He made a soft huff, but he didn't call her out on it this time. He didn't ask her to lie. But she wasn't lying. She did worry, in a way. Not the way he wanted, maybe. She didn’t want to be married to him anymore, but she never wished him dead.


Stephanie went into the kitchen and she started dinner.

Jeremiah hadn't said one thing or another about Justin since that phone call a couple weeks ago. Nothing at all, in fact, and it was driving Stephanie insane. So she mentioned something briefly today about Lily, just to gauge his response—she didn't have the courage to mention Justin by name—but Jeremiah responded completely neutrally. She could almost convince herself that he was okay with it all. That he knew and he was okay with it. Or calm, at least. He sounded calm. He said he’d been practicing meditation and yoga. "I’m trying to be a better man, Stephanie. I’m learning to soothe and strengthen my fickle mind."

Fickle was a good word for Jeremiah, she thought. But it seemed like he was trying to work on some things, and she was glad for that. Maybe it would all be okay?

"Wow!"


A chipper voice appeared out of absolutely nowhere and Stephanie dropped the pepper shaker she was shaking into the bowl. "That smells so good," Lucy said. "What are you making?"

Lucy was quite alarming for such a sweet, gentle-looking thing.

"Taco casserole," Stephanie said. Taco casserole with a lot of pepper in it.

"I’m so hungry. I feel like I'm constantly hungry. Were you this hungry when you were pregnant? Did you like being pregnant? I've never known any other pregnant girls my age. All the people I know who have ever been pregnant are like, my friends' moms, and I figure it's been so long since they were pregnant that they can't really remember it that well. But you must have been about my age when you got pregnant with Willow, right?"

"About," Stephanie said.

There was a silence then and Stephanie guessed she was supposed to say how old she was when she was pregnant.

"Twenty-one," Stephanie said.

"Yeah, I bet if I'd at least waited until my twenties, my parents might have been less weird about it? What did your parents think about it when you told them? Were they mad? I mean, I finished high school at least. It's not like I dropped out of high school over it or anything."


Lucy stopped talking and Stephanie started at her blankly, not knowing which question she was meant to answer, not remembering what the questions were at all.

"So, are we waiting for Justin to come back for dinner?"

Stephanie shook her head. "No, he’ll be out there until ten. I’ll probably bring mine out to the car and eat with him."

"That is so sweet," Lucy said. "You guys are like the cutest couple ever. How long have you been together?"

That was a complicated question and Stephanie didn't know how to answer it. "Um, a while."

"I hope me and Dallas will be like that after we’ve been together a while. We've been together three years so far. Officially. Five, I guess, if you count the time he was abroad, or if you count the other time we weren't supposed to be dating but, you know, we were kind of dating and just not calling it that. That's not bad for people our age."

"No, not bad," Stephanie said.


"Justin isn't Willow's dad, is he?"

"Um, no."

"I just guessed. Because Willow doesn’t really look like Justin. And because that other guy keeps calling. Why does he keep calling?"

Stephanie slipped the casserole into the oven and took a deep breath. For a moment, she considered whether this was all part of an elaborate scheme where Jeremiah and Keri conspired together to send this pregnant girl into their home as a spy. What a terrific disguise! Who would have ever guessed that this bubbly pregnant teenager was a clandestine super spy?

But Lucy sat down at the table and looked at the other chair across from her like an eager lost puppy. Stephanie sat down.

"Because … he thinks he’s still my husband."


"You were married to him?"

"Um, yeah."

"But he’s not your husband now?"

"Well, technically he is."

"Oh, but, I thought … I thought you and Justin were together. You said it's been a while. I don't get it."


Stephanie felt bad for the look on her sweet little face, like Stephanie had just told her that the Easter bunny wasn’t real. Lucy was the kind of girl who intended to marry the first boy she ever fell in love with and stay happily and faithfully married until the day she died, and she would never understand how anyone else could do it differently.

"We are together," Stephanie said. "But I got married to somebody else first. It’s complicated. You think I’m a bad person now?"

"No," Lucy said, sounding unsure. "But is it because you didn’t know Justin then?"

"I knew him. I’ve known him since I was a kid."

"Oh," Lucy said. "Then ... you weren’t in love with him back then?"

"I was. But he was with somebody else."


"So you were in love with Justin, but you married somebody else anyway?"

When she put it that way, it sounded so dumb. "I didn’t think it through," Stephanie said. "I made a mistake."

Stephanie looked at Lucy’s engagement ring, thinking Lucy was even younger than Stephanie had been when she got married.

"I’m not married yet," Lucy said. "Just engaged."

"I probably should have tried just being engaged first."

"You were never engaged?"

"We eloped."

Lucy's eyes went wide. "Whoa, that’s crazy."


"But what are you going to do? You don’t love your husband? Does he love you? Are you leaving him? Does he know? Will he be sad? But won’t Justin be sad if you don’t leave your husband? Who do you think would be sadder?"

Stephanie clammed up. She tried to think of an escape. All of these questions gave her too much to think about.

"I’m sorry," Lucy said. "My mom won't talk to me anymore. I just have so many questions."

Don’t we all, Stephanie thought.

"But you both seem like really nice people," Lucy added. "I don’t judge you, however it came to be."

However it came to be that you’re so shamelessly cheating on your husband.

The timer. Stephanie scooted back from the table and ran to the oven.


"That smells so good," Lucy said. "Maybe you could show me how to make it some time?"

"Maybe," Stephanie said as she realized that she was holding her escape. Justin needed some dinner out by the road. She portioned out the casserole and put two pieces in Tupperware, and then she made a run for it.


The air was down to twelve percent oxygen now. You could go outside, but not for long. Long enough to water the plants, to check the mail, to walk from the front door to the intersection where their side street met the main road. Stephanie always took a few luxurious seconds to stop and watch the sunset when she was out there. The droning song of the little shits in the sky had drowned out the chirp of the birds, and Stephanie hoped that didn’t mean the birds were all dead. How much oxygen did the birds need? They found three dead squirrels in their garden this week.

She wondered if the world would ever be the way it used to be. Maybe it didn’t need to be the end of everything, it would just be very different. People wouldn't die, they would just scurry from bubble to bubble, from their air-conditioned houses to cars to shops to work.


And like everything else that was different, this would just be how people had their evening picnics now—they would watch the world through glass while the sky flashed with glints of metal in front of the sun.

—

Keri had already told them that Lucy's baby would be different, but tonight, Violet tried to explain how different. Alice made cocktails and Lucy had milk, and they all sat around the kitchen table to hear Violet's stories. "We have nothing to do with them, those ones in the sky. Those aren't our people. I don't even know if they're flesh like us at all."

"We know," Alice said.

"But some people don't know. Some people are afraid of us, but they don't understand that they have nothing to be afraid of with Orion's people. They're such kind beings, they're scientists and explorers. Or well, that's what we've come to learn about them so far."

"Are there more here like your husband?"

"His mother died when he was a young man, even before he met me. He only knew what she told him. Most people who knew her discounted her as a nutjob. Nobody believed her except her children, and even then, not all of her children believed her either. Just Orion and Cabe. She told Orion that he was the only one. Their people bred with species from all over the galaxy, but he was the first on Earth. How she put it was, 'We adopted each other. They chose me and I chose them, and together we created the baby who would become you.' I suppose you can imagine how everyone thought she was crazy."


"But the most interesting thing about Orion was something I don't think she ever got to learn before she died, because it was something we didn't know about him until his children were born." Violet turned to Lucy. "And Lucy, I'm so eager to see if this is true of the baby as well. They speak to each other without words. Only to each other, which was why we never knew it until his children were born. How he put it was, they think at each other. I wouldn't have thought it was possible until I saw it with my own eyes. When the kids were just toddlers, they didn't even know many words at all, and yet they seemed to communicate with each other. Delphie and Dakota still do it all the time, although people think it's just a weird twin thing—it's more than that."

"We can't do it though," Lucy said. "Only them. I tried it once with Dallas, but I couldn't hear anything. He says he can hear me sometimes though if I'm thinking at him really hard. I have to be careful what I'm thinking about."

"What about the baby?" Stephanie asked.

"She'll be like him, too. But I guess she’ll be like me a little."

"She's the first of the third generation of hybrids," Violet said. "We really have no idea what she'll look like. We've never been this far before."

"You’re having a girl?"


Lucy nodded. "I want to name her Cassie, short for Cassiopeia. That’s the star system where they’re from. When we first met, I was at Dallas’s house for a pool party, and he saw these five freckles on my arm in the shape of Cassiopeia and he traced them with his finger. I think that’s why he fell in love with me."

"That’s not why," Violet said.

"Well, I guess he also said my eyes were like chocolate. But you know what else he said to me, what really did it? He said, 'You are it for me, forever and ever.' Did you ever just look at somebody and have your heart break from so much love?"

Everyone else at the table swooned over Lucy's romantic proposal story, but Justin only looked at Stephanie.


"Every day," he said, just so softly that only she could hear it.

—

"Will he call again tonight?"

"Probably not. I talked to him earlier."

"Has it been okay? The phone calls? I mean, has he been upsetting you?"

"It’s been fine," she said.

Justin reached for her nervous fingers and pulled her closer. "I wish I could do that alien mind-melding trick," he said. "I can't, though. I'm just a regular human and I can't read your mind. But I do know that when you say you're fine, you're not really fine. Whenever you're actually fine, you always say something else."


She sat down. "It's been mostly fine. There was one thing that upset me, but that was a couple weeks ago and you already know about that."

"You know you can always tell me anything, right? First, before everything, I’ll always be your best friend. We’ll never let it change us, remember? You can tell me anything and I won't get mad, I won’t get sad—I mean, I’ll try not to get sad. But I promise I’ll always listen."

"I know," she said. "Okay, so there is one other thing. But I don't even know if it's a thing. I think he knows about us, but now he's been acting like he doesn't even care about it at all. And that seems weird."

"You're right, that is weird," Justin said.


There was nothing else on her mind that she had to tell him, but she did have questions. "Why did you convince Jeremiah to propose to me?"

"What do you mean?"

"Wasn’t that the thing? You guys planned it. When we went on that spring break trip to Three Lakes, you and Jeremiah got the lumberjack shirts together and you had some plan that you’d both propose?"

"Well, kind of," Justin said. "But it was the other way around. It was his idea, not mine."

That didn’t make any sense. Jeremiah hardly knew her. They hadn’t even been dating a year and she couldn’t remember their early relationship being particularly spellbinding or anything. It must have been Justin’s idea since he and Keri had been together so much longer.


She rolled onto her side and looked him in the eyes. "Are you sure you didn’t mention it first?"

"Very sure," he said. "Don’t you remember how fumbling my proposal was? I was nineteen, what did I know about proposing? I guess it did seem odd that he was so eager for me to propose to Keri. I didn’t get why he cared so much."

Now Justin seemed to be analyzing it, too.

"I think I know why," Stephanie said.

She never understood then why it meant so much to Jeremiah—he’d only just met them. He hardly knew Stephanie at that point, so he knew Justin and Keri even less. But what he did know was how special Justin was to Stephanie. He knew how far they went back, to childhood, to that tender place at the formation of their two little lives where they were carved into each other’s bones, and Jeremiah didn’t like that at all.

Well, at least he’s seeing someone, Jeremiah had said to her. I wouldn't let you keep seeing him if he wasn’t.

"I think he’s been trying to get rid of you ever since I first met him."

Justin grinned. "Impossible. I’m like a cockroach and you’re my favorite cupboard."


She laughed so heartily that she nearly forgot how grave a realization she'd just made.

"And cockroaches are indestructible," he added.

"Except to exterminators," she joked. Then she gasped. "Oh god, that's not even funny."

"It's okay, I'd come back as a ghost."

"To haunt him?"

"No way," he said. "Why would I want to spend my little cockroach afterlife on him? I'd haunt you."

It was a cute response, but she frowned anyway.

"Steph, he won't really kill me. Not like literally dead."

"I don’t know. I’ve heard stories about some of Bella’s boyfriends and she and Jeremiah weren’t even a couple. Much less actually married."

"Well, I'll take a shiner or two if that's what it comes to."

She ran her thumb along his cheekbone. "I hope not, because I really really love your face."

He smiled. "Yeah? Well, thanks. I'm really in love with yours, too."

—