Drown #11: three little birds, part 5

March 2086. Stephanie Nova and Justin Kim are 26. Willow and Lily are 4. Keri Riley is 25.


Keri slept like heaven and dreamed about distant stars. Gravity pulled the full weight of her body down, heavy and deep into that pillow top mattress. Not even her arms floated into the air with a sudden dream movement. The morning sun was soft behind storm clouds and she dozed long into the morning.



But a few days into her vacation, she already felt aimless and missed the regiment and order of her days on base. She tried to remember college and what she ever did before she had real things to do. Card games and drunken parties and lots and lots of sex. Not that she disliked any of those things. In fact, those things were still a nice indulgence after a long day of work. But the idea of a whole life of all that leisure bored her now.

Stephanie and Justin asked Keri if she'd watch the girls while they went to a prenatal appointment. "Sure," Keri said. "How hard could it be?"

But she'd only checked in with some work emails for a minute or two, and one of them was already gone. "Oh shit, where is Willow?"




Keri got up and started to panic, but she saw Willow, hopping across the stream on stones just a few feet away from the waterfall.

"You're a slippery one," Keri said. "You're going to get me in trouble. Everybody sit down where I can see you."

"She's not allowed to walk on the rocks," Lily tattled. "I'm gonna tell Steffie."


"We don't need to tell Stephanie everything, do we?" Keri said.

"We always tell Steffie everything," Lily said. "Cause she said we have no secrets in this family."

"You always do what Stephanie says?"

Lily looked bewildered. "You gotta do what Steffie says. Or you'll get in trouble!"

"Of course. That's actually really smart. I probably would have gotten in a lot less trouble if I did what my parents said when I was a kid. But you wanna know a secret?"

"Yeah."

"When Stephanie was little, she didn't do everything her parents said either."

"Whoa! Really?" Willow said. "What did she do?"

Keri giggled, remembering high school. "All kinds of things. But she should tell you that herself some day."

"I'm gonna tell Gramma Alice," Lily said.

"No, you don't need to tell your grandma," Keri said. "I'm pretty sure she knows by now."


When Justin told her that Lily was doing great on the violin, Keri had expected something slightly better than "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." Still, Keri felt oddly proud. She never had a musical bone in her own body. She liked to think that came from her dad, but Stephanie's dad was a musician, too.

When Justin and Stephanie got home from their appointment, they brought home the flavorful smells of some restaurant they'd snuck off to. No wonder they were gone for four hours for just a routine prenatal appointment. But they also brought back leftovers for dinner, so Keri didn't complain. She offered to put the girls to bed for them, because how hard could it be?


"But you gotta spray for monsters," Lily said.

"Spray for what? What kind of spray?"

"It's in the bathroom, duh. It says 'Monster Spray'."

Keri found an old Windex bottle that had been covered in masking tape. Stephanie's handwriting declared, Monster Spray, Non-Toxic and 100% Effective! She'd even drawn brightly cartoonish monsters on the label with smiling faces, wild hair, and jazz hands.

Keri turned the spout open and sniffed. "It's just water," Keri said.

Lily shook her head. "No, it's Monster Spray. Can't you read?"


Keri squirted at Lily's bed. "Am I doing it right?"

"No. You gotta spray under the bed, cause that’s where the monster lives."

"Oh, right. Gotcha." Keri bent down and sprayed underneath.


"All set?"

"No," Lily said. "You gotta spray Willow’s bed too."

"Is that all?"

"No. You have to turn on the nightlight and say goodnight to Beatrice and Larry?"


"Who are Beatrice and Larry?"

"The frogs."

"You want me to say goodnight to the frogs?"

"You have to! Or they'll be sad! And Bun Bun and Tom, too."

"Who are Bun Bun and Tom?"

"The rabbits."

"Real rabbits or toy ones?"

Lily rolled her eyes. "They're not really real. We just pretend."


Keri went around the room saying goodnight to all of the things, alive and pretend, feeling like an absolute moron.


Lily was fast asleep by the time she'd finished.

Keri tried to remember if she'd ever been an imaginative little girl. Maybe this was Justin in her. Maybe it was Stephanie. Lily had her own little budding personality and good or bad habits and impressions of Stephanie and Justin and Willow and her grandparents. She wasn’t the same little baby Keri left behind four years ago. Keri wondered what kind of a little girl Lily might have been if she'd stayed?


"I guess they're asleep. Holy hell, I think that took an hour. What were you guys doing? Where's Stephanie?"

"Tired," Justin said, then smiled to himself.

Oh, cupcakes and milk on the table. Keri quickly remembered how snackish he got after sex. She would try to fall asleep and find him gone, opening and closing cupboards and fridge doors, then trying to crawl back into bed with cookie crumbs all over. She'd yell at him, Jesus, can't you just turn over and fall asleep after sex like a normal man?

"Do you want a cupcake?" he asked her.

Keri felt mad and disgusted and sad all at once. "Uh, no. I'm just going to head back to the hotel."

"I'll drive you," he offered.

Then another memory ambushed her. The three of them in his car, high school senior prom. It was their first date. She hardly knew who Justin was back then, some scrawny little dweeb who followed Stephanie around, like all the other scrawny little hopefuls that followed Stephanie around. On her first date with him, he drove Stephanie home too. So what, Stephanie had said, I broke up with my boyfriend, I needed a ride. But he dropped Keri off first because her house was closer. That always bothered her, like an omen hanging over their relationship. We didn't do anything, Stephanie promised. We just talked. What, you thought we made out or something? Why are you being so weird?

No, Keri didn't think she was lying, but it was just always there. Keri's very first date with him, and while he walked her to the door to say goodnight, Stephanie was waiting for him in his car. Always waiting, always there. It felt kind of symbolic now, the great mysterious circle that brought them right back to before it all started.

"I'll walk," Keri said. "I want to walk."

"But the air."


"I'm not supposed to say so, but it's fine. Out here, it's fine enough. The trees and lack of congestion, no big cities, no traffic exhaust. The warning is still for dense cities and sensitive populations. So not the kids maybe, not Stephanie, but it's fine."

"Hey, that's good news," he said.

He looked for a split second like he maybe didn't hate her, if only because she had some good news. Fair enough, she thought.

"So, goodnight, I guess," she said.

"Are you sure? I don't mind."

It was tempting to accept, to let him take care of her like he always used to. But that wasn’t his job anymore. "I want to walk."


The stars looked strange down here under the twinkling filter of Earth’s atmosphere. It was loud down here with the bugs chirping and wind whirring and streams babbling. The countryside was lovely but she only needed a day or two to relax, and now she yearned for some purpose and something to do. She had to set up an office at the ISCA headquarters in Washington DC. She had to help her leaders transition from wartime defense to peacetime exploration and study. It was the same fire she felt when she woke one night in college, dreaming of leaving her imprint on the world.

Here, she felt useless and in the way. Here, it only reminded her of everything she gave up.

Because the life they lived here, what if she just didn’t have that in her? Domesticity, tenderness, nurturing, saying goodnight to pretend rabbits and real frogs, spraying monsters with water. Maybe she had a lot of other things in her. Courage, bravado, stubborn dog-headed fury. Maybe those things canceled out the others? She never wanted to pretend that it would ever be something that it wasn't.

The three weeks went by as quickly as it had the first time, and Keri had hardly made much impact here in this little family. When she left again, she wouldn’t leave much of an imprint on her daughter or her ex-husband or her long ago best friend. Not this time, and not the next, either.

—

Justin had to work long hours at the mines, but lucky for the rest of them, his family reaped the benefit of his hefty employee discount to any of the historic sites in Copper County. The Lost Falls Botanical Gardens boasted pristine air conditions—one of the few places in the country where you could spend time outdoors!—due to an abundance of exotic plant life photosynthesizing into the air and no pollution from nearby cities.

Stephanie and Keri decided to take the girls out to spend a day there.
















"We'll eat in a little while, but you can go play with Willow," Stephanie told Lily. "It's okay, we'll be right here."

"You're not going away?"

"Nope."

"Not even to pee?"

"Tell you what, if I need to pee, I'll tell you first."

"Okay," Lily said. "I'll save my pee so I can go with you."

Stephanie laughed. "Oh, honey, don't save your pee. We can go whenever you're ready."

"Okay," Lily said, flashing a quick smile and then running off to the fountain to play.




Keri watched Lily play, feeling curious but also foreign. She watched her little girl play like she might study an alien civilization.

"It's not just you," Stephanie said, offering a sympathetic shrug. "She's been clingy for a while. Since December, I guess. I didn’t think what Jeremiah did would have registered with them, but I guess it did. With Lily, at least. Willow doesn't seem to care at all, but Lily thinks somebody will take her away. Or take me away. And with the new baby coming, new house, and Willow's starting school a year ahead of her, it’s just a lot of change all at once. But she'll get used it all. And you. It’ll take time."

The thing was, Keri knew she didn't have that kind of time to invest. Stephanie’s had four years with Lily. Keri would miss half of her life entirely, and for the other half she'd only have long weekends and vacations, a little bit here and there. That was no way to mother a child. And that was the problem. She would never get to make up that time. It would never be enough. Instead, she’d only offer half of herself and do neither part of her life justice.

She didn’t want to do that again. She never wanted to disappoint anyone. She didn’t want to ever promise that this would become something she knew it couldn't be.


"There’s something we should talk about," Keri said.

"Oh, do you want to wait for Justin to get home?"

"No, this is something I need to ask you first. But I want to explain. See, we’re working on something really big. It might not come into fruition for a few years though. It's like everything I ever wanted is actually happening."

"That sounds exciting," Stephanie said.

"It really is. This is like, groundbreaking. These are things no human being has ever done before and I get to be a part of it. You know I was never good at much of anything, but I found this and I feel useful, you know. When it does happen, you guys should know that I might be gone for a while longer than usual. Longer than a year or whatever. You guys will still get the child support and everything. Christ, you guys could probably have all of it. I can't even use my money where I'm going."

"Can you say where you’re going?"

"I’m not supposed to, but I will. We’re going to Eta Cassiopeia. It’s nineteen light years away, but we have some new technologies we’re working with. They’re thinking for a first mission, it might be feasible to get there, spend some time, and come back all within five years."

"Five years? And you already said yes?"

"I haven't yet," Keri said. "But I'm going to."

"You know that's a long time to a kid?"


"I do know that," Keri said. "I know it is. I know I’ve missed a lot and I’ll probably miss a whole lot more. There are some choices that are just sucky to have to make. But there are these two lives and there’s not really any compromise about it. And it's not like I didn't want this other life, I just wanted it less. Like, one life I wanted fifteen percent and the other life I wanted eighty percent, and maybe five percent I wasn’t sure what I wanted. But I have to choose. The two lives just don’t work together, you know. I can’t choose both. I can't compromise. And I know that you guys are doing a really good job with her. I mean, you are, too. I know that she loves you. I know that you love her, too."

Stephanie was stunned.

"Because the thing is, I know Justin is a great dad, but she’s a girl and she’s gonna need a mom. One who’s going to be there for her every day, and maybe I can just be like the cool aunt that comes down from space with some rocks and alien specimens every now and then. I would be awesome at the cool aunt thing. You’re a better mom than I would have been. I just wondered if maybe you would be that for her? Would you be her mom?"


"Me? But I thought you hated me."

"No," Keri said. "It's not exactly like that. It's just ... a transitional phase. It's sticky."

Stephanie chuckled softly, her lips trembling and eyes filling with tears. "I would love to, with all my heart. But only if that's really what you want?"

"I’d feel a lot better about going if I knew she wouldn’t miss anything. And if she has you, she won’t."

"Yes, I’ll be that for her," Stephanie said. "I promise."

"You already are," Keri said. "She already knows it."

They watched the girls play for a few minutes in silence. In Keri's useless heart, everything felt as right as it was meant to be.

"We don't need to make a big deal about it," Keri said. "We'll make it legal, so you won't run into any trouble while I'm gone. But it'll just be like it always was."

Stephanie nodded.

"Okay, shit, let's stop it now. I hate crying." Keri sniffled and called out to the girls. "Girls, come eat. Let's eat these sandwiches before the mosquitoes eat us. That's something I don't miss about Earth, mosquitoes."

"Did a mosquito ever get on a spaceship?" Lily asked.

"Not on my watch," she said. She began to tell an outrageous and heavily embellished story about stowaway Earth bugs at the lunar colony—the kind of bold and unreliable story that only the cool aunt could tell—then Keri realized that she had finally found a natural place in her little girl's life.

—

outtakes: the date Justin and Stephanie snuck off to while Keri was watching the girls 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 // Steph is feeling pretty great finally // at least Keri is not really truly this bad of a parent

notes: my botanical gardens lot is available for download. I guess most of what I showcased in this post was just the default garden grounds, but I promise, the building is lovely inside too!