I WATCHED CHRIS WALK BACK across the field, and I pressed my hands against my cheeks, opening and closing my mouth, all the muscles in my face strained from laughing so much.
Dad was in the kitchen washing his hands at the sink, his microwave dinner box sitting open on the counter. Glancing over his shoulder at me, he said, “Everything work out?”
“Yeah,” I told him.
He turned around and grabbed the dish towel that was hanging off the handle of the stove. “Good.”
“Daddy?” I couldn’t help thinking back to our last interaction in the kitchen the night before, the look on his face when he walked away. “Thanks again for helping.”
“You’re welcome.” He dried his hands, looking down once again, like he was stopping himself from saying more. “You know,” he added. “You could’ve just asked me for help to begin with.”
Really, could I have, though? Instead I said another version of the truth: “I didn’t want to bother you.”
“Bother me?” He smiled—actually smiled, for the first time in I don’t know how long. “What do you think dads are for?”
I’m not sure anymore. But I didn’t say that either.
“Well, thanks again. I’m sure you saved us hours of not knowing what we were doing.”
As I started to walk away, he called me back. “Wait, Mai?”
“Yeah?”
“That boy,” he began. “Nice kid. Seemed, anyway.”
I shrugged, nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.” I didn’t want to appear too enthusiastic. About Chris. About this conversation. About anything, really.
“Is he . . .” He paused, and looked at me, hard, like he was waiting for the word to magically appear in the air between us. “Funny?” he finally finished, uncertain.
It took me a second to make sense of his intonation. I thought maybe he had heard us laughing, but no, he wasn’t talking ha-ha-comedy funny. I was going to make him say what he meant—that’s what Mallory would have done.
“Hilarious,” I replied, crossing my arms.
He rolled his eyes, either at me or himself, I couldn’t tell. “You know what I mean.”
“No.” I looked up at the ceiling, pretending to consider it. “I don’t think I do.”
He lowered his voice and said, “I meant gay, Maia.”
“Gay?” I repeated more loudly, and I saw him look over my shoulder toward the door, just in case Chris was still out there or had somehow developed superhuman hearing. “You know that’s not a bad word, right?”
“I know that, thank you very much.” He turned back toward the counter and unpacked the plastic tray of frozen food and held it between his hands, picking at the edge of the plastic film. “I was just wondering. Something about him, I don’t know. I just thought—maybe?”
My parents were weird about plenty, but never stuff like this. They were pretty liberal. They taught us to be too, so I had no idea where this conversation was coming from, or where it was heading.
“Dad, how would I know?” I finally answered.
“Okay, okay,” he said, holding his hands up. “I won’t bring it up again.”
“Wait, why does it even matter?” I demanded. “Since when do you care about stuff like that?”
He lowered his chin and looked at me like I was the one who was completely clueless now. “Since never. I’m just trying to decide how worried I need to be.”
“Worried about what?”
“About you running around town with some kid nobody knows.”
“Oh,” was all I could say.
“Is that a problem?” he added pointedly, echoing the words I’d said to him, except the way it sounded coming from his mouth was totally different. Playful, not spiteful like mine had been.
Dad could surprise me sometimes.
I wanted to say, Touché, Dad, way to stand up to me, but that would have killed the moment. Instead I said, “No, it’s not a problem.”
“Good.” He placed his dinner in the microwave and closed the door. “Glad to hear it.”
“Well, I honestly have no idea if he is or not.”
And just as I was thinking, I hope not, Dad said, “I hope so.”
I pulled my hoodie down off the hook in the hallway. I was about to leave, but I ducked my head back in. “I’m gonna go for a bike ride. I won’t be late,” I told him.
He said, “Be careful.”
I knew he wasn’t only talking about the bike.
This was the first glimmer I’d seen in months—years, really—of Dad trying to be a dad. He was thinking about reclaiming his title. It was a sign of life. A sign that underneath that sad exterior there was still a part of him that was someone other than the guy who screwed up so bad, he would be willing to serve penance for it for the rest of his existence.
• • •
I was pedaling faster than I think I’d ever gone before. My legs felt strong and solid, powerful. Maybe it was the twilight falling around me—the urgency of the day ending—that was propelling me, pushing me forward.
As I breathed, my lungs felt light and loose. From laughing with Chris. Or maybe it was a result of all that debris that got washed away between me and Hayden. Or whatever had just been cleared out with my dad.
Maybe Chris was right, and things didn’t have to seem so terrible.
I thought about that car ride, the way it felt to have the windows rolled down, the wind blowing against my skin and through my hair—that was as free as I’d felt in a while. A long while. Maybe ever. I let go of the handlebar with one hand and reached up to pull the elastic band out of my hair. My hair fell down and whipped all around me in the wind, just like the other night.
I passed Bowman’s and the school and Bargain Mart and the gas station. I wished I could ride all the way out to New Pines. I wished there were more light left in the day. I made my way back along the exact route I’d come by.
Riding past the PRIVATE PROPERTY sign that designated Bowman’s, my thoughts drifted once again to Chris. Maybe it was Hayden’s words still on my mind, or my dad’s. Whatever it was, instead of turning off the road into my driveway, I turned onto the gravel path that led up to the gray, wooden house I’d lived across from my entire life.
Up close, it was more disheveled than I thought—chipped paint and weeds, and the roof over the porch looked like it could cave in at any moment. I stopped my bike in front of the house and was debating about what exactly I was even doing there, when I heard a voice above me.
“Test driving the new wheels?”
When I looked up, Chris was leaning over the railing of the balcony on the side of the house, the one I could see from my bedroom window. Walking over to where Chris was, I backed up so I could see him better. Behind him there was a telescope.
“Are you looking for your bipolar stars up there?” I called up to him.
“Binary stars,” he corrected.
“I know,” I told him.
He laughed a little—he got it.
“The tires are good,” I offered.
I liked the way he was looking at me, with this easy smile. I liked the way he was leaning, with his elbows propped on the edge of the railing. There was something inviting about his face, his stance, his everything.
“I was not looking for bipolar stars,” he told me, lifting his head to gaze out somewhere above the tree line. “I was looking at Saturn.” He raised his arm and pointed.
I turned around and tried to follow his gesture. The stars were multiplying by the minute as the sky grew darker. I had absolutely no clue which bright spot was Saturn.
When I turned back toward him, he was no longer looking at the sky; he was looking at me. “What?” I asked.
“Do you want to come up and look with me?”
It’s always strange entering someone’s house for the first time. The kitchen was clean and minimal—not a bunch of gadgets and things lying around. It was dated, for sure, but nice. He led me into the living room, where Isobel was sitting in an old armchair sleeping.
It was strange to see her—this woman I’d seen around town forever—in her own home. “Aunt Isobel works these insane hours at the hospital,” he whispered as we headed up the stairs. “So she sleeps at weird times.”
“Oh,” I replied, suddenly feeling shy and awkward. Because in that instant, not only had Isobel become more real to me, Chris had as well.
“Be careful in here,” he said as we walked down a narrow hallway and entered another room. “I have the lights off so we can see better—I mean, see the stars better.”
My eyes adjusted quickly. I could make out a bed, a mirror, a dresser, two nightstands, a lamp, and a closed closet door. The only light was coming in through the open door that led outside.
“Can you see okay?” he asked, holding out his hand. “Do you need me to turn a light on?”
“No, I think I’m okay.” But I reached for his hand anyway. Only our fingertips touched, just for a moment, with this weird electric thrill.
Out on the balcony, the breeze was stronger than it had been on the ground. I looked across the field at my house. Dim light was coming from the kitchen window; it was the light above the sink. My house looked so small from here. Like a toy house. Not something real people could live in.
“So, what are we looking at?” I asked, trying hard to push aside the thoughts of my house and its inhabitants—I wanted to be here, fully here, in this moment with Chris.
“Well, it’s really clear tonight, so you have your pick.” He raised his arm and pointed out at the sky, starting at the far left of our field of vision. “We have Jupiter.” He moved his arm to the right. “Saturn.” Right again, “Venus, and Mercury.”
He leaned over to look through the eyepiece, adjusting the position of the telescope. As I watched him, I wanted to reach out and touch his hand again. He reminded me of Mallory, the way she would get quiet as she concentrated on twisting the lens and getting her shot just right, like the whole rest of the world had disappeared and it was just her and the camera and the thing they were looking at.
“Okay,” he said, stepping aside, “take a look.”
As I leaned over and peered through the eyepiece, just as he had, I was fully unprepared for it. “Oh my god,” I whispered. I opened my mouth again, but my speech was impaired by what my eyes were seeing. When the words finally came, they were halted and stiff. “I. Can’t. Believe. What. I’m. Seeing. Right. Now.”
“You’ve never looked through a telescope before,” he said. Not a question but an observation.
“No,” I whispered, looking at him.
“It’s pretty amazing, right?” His face lit up. His reaction to my reaction was almost better than the actual experience.
I looked up at the sky and then back through the telescope.
“Look again. Do you see those two dots on either side? One is kind of to the right, and the other is lower, to the left?” I saw exactly what he described. “Those are two of Jupiter’s moons.”
I looked up at him again. “I—I just—this really is amazing.”
“Okay, if you think that’s cool, let me show you something else.” He adjusted the telescope again. “Jupiter gets all the attention because it’s the biggest, but this has always been my favorite.”
He moved aside so I could look again.
“No,” I breathed. “This can’t be real.”
“You see it?”
“It’s Saturn.” I laughed. “I can see its rings. Like actually see them, right there.”
“I know,” he said.
“All right,” I admitted. “Now I can see where your whole theory comes from. Not the depressing one, but what you said the other night. About how things just work out. Now you almost have me believing it.”
We were standing so close and there wasn’t much room to move around, with the telescope taking up most of the space, and I swore, for a moment, when our eyes met, I felt us moving even closer.
I should look away, I thought. But I couldn’t. He was watching my mouth. I felt my lips wanting to part slightly. He leaned in. I so badly wanted him to kiss me. But right before that point of no return, that one instant before it was going to happen, something caught my eye. I looked over his shoulder, breaking the spell.
Chris cleared his throat and looked down quickly, raking his hand through his hair as he backed away from me. He glanced behind him to where I was looking. It was almost like the door had moved slightly, pushed open a mere fraction of an inch by the breeze. The light caught the glass and reflected like a tiny spark.
Once again, I could not believe what I was seeing.
It was nearly impossible to drag my gaze away from the stained glass window that I’d barely even had a chance to search for, yet here it was, delivering itself to me.
When he turned back around and met my eyes again, I was the one to look away.
The moment passed—this perfect, magical moment—and it was my fault. I had dropped it, let it slip through my hands, and it shattered, lying there in pieces on the floor.
“So,” he said, putting an end to this excruciating silence. “You should know”—he paused, and my heart thumped hard as I waited for him to finish—“you might be a bit of an astronomy geek.”
I laughed nervously. So he was going to ignore what had just happened, or didn’t happen, between us. I was equally disappointed and relieved.
I followed suit: “You might be right about that.”
Things seemed to settle back into place around us. The door moved again, ever so slightly, accompanied by a tiny creak I’m not sure Chris even heard.
I looked out across the field in the direction of my house again.
“So, I should probably get back,” I said. “Um, thanks again. That was—”
“Yeah, it was,” he said, finishing the sentence I couldn’t.