The airport taxi dropped them off at the lakehouse. The house was built with red wood shingles and wide upper windows. Purple salvia grew bushy by the door. The yard was mown in strips, light and dark like carpeting. But at the perimeter, Ingrid left long shaggy alleys where false indigo and thimbleweed volunteered itself. She could not bear to mow it down.
Jinx peed on some wildflowers.
I’ve always loved this house, Nolan said. When I was little, it felt like visiting a place in a storybook.
That’s a ridiculous thing to say, said Elsa. You complained there was nothing to do here.
I loved that too, Nolan said.
Stop rewriting history, Elsa said. I hate it when people pretend pretty things about the past.
What if I’m just outing the truth, Nolan said. I couldn’t tell you I liked it here back then. You were superior enough as it was.
I was never, Elsa said, but of course it was true. She had been, she was sure, insufferable.
Elsa breathed deeply. The smell off the lake was enough like home to make Elsa think she would never leave again. That she must cling to this good place while it lasted. But maybe things weren’t so tenuous. Maybe there was no reason to suspect it would disappear on her.
Ingrid came jogging down the gravel path.
I have missed you, missed you, missed you, she said, and hugged Elsa. She was wearing her apron and an old purple t-shirt. Jeans and Tevas. Her blond hair was pulled back messily.
I thought you’d be at work, Elsa said.
I took a bit of time off, Ingrid said.
No.
Ingrid nodded.
You never take time off.
I thought it would be nice to spend some time as a family, Ingrid said.
Hullo, Ingrid, Nolan said.
And Ingrid’s eyes welled up. You are enormous, she said. She opened her arms and Nolan hugged her, lifting her from the ground. You are so welcome here, Ingrid said.
You’re acting weird, Elsa said, as Ingrid began pulling the backpack off of her. Over her shoulder Elsa repeated, This is weird.
Everything good is weird, dearest. This is so heavy, let me take it, Ingrid said, shouldering Elsa’s pack. Just come in, I’m making lunch!
Nolan was beaming. Elsa followed her mother into the house, flexing her shoulders.
Ingrid bustled around the kitchen. Nolan sat at the kitchen table. After the past week Elsa knew him so intimately, the way he sat with his elbows on a table, leaning into his hands, the downy place where his earlobe connected to his jaw, the stupid way he looked around this room, as if it were so wonderful.
Ingrid was setting out the sandwiches and salad and pouring lemonade and with each pass, she tweaked Elsa’s waist or patted Nolan’s shoulder and it made Elsa crazy to see her acting like there was nothing better than the two of them here like this.
Elsa, Ingrid said. Sit! Sandwiches! Ingrid sat at the table next to Nolan.
The sight of them together at the table made Elsa dizzy. It was as if the world had tipped to one side and everything that used to be over there, separate and away, the whole past part of her life with Nolan and Ian and Keiko, had slid across the landscape to squash together with her real life, over here, with Ingrid. She had kept them separate for so long, the past and the present. But now things were jumbled, mixed, and it seemed impossibly unreal.
You hate Nolan and me together, Elsa said, then stopped. She was speaking the unspeakable, and yet, she found it was easier to talk because Nolan was there with her. He was the one who had opened all this up again and now it would have out.
Ever since you walked in on us, years ago, Elsa said. You didn’t talk about it, you wouldn’t let us see each other, you pretended it didn’t happen but everything was wrong.
Elsa— Ingrid said.
She’s right, Nolan said.
We could both feel it, how wrong it was, and we didn’t know how to fix it because we were children. That was your job. And none of you did anything. You just ignored it forever and then we had to fix it ourselves, Elsa said. It took us this long to fix it ourselves and we did and now, what, you’re not even going to notice that? We’re just going to eat sandwiches?
Elsa had to say it, before Ingrid painted a rosy tint over everything that had happened. Before she erased the past completely.
You did this to us! Elsa said.
All three of you, Nolan said.
You hated us, Elsa said.
Ingrid was placid. Don’t be ridiculous, she said. No one has ever hated you.
You did, though, Elsa said. You all did and you’re forgetting everything.
Ingrid got up and squeezed Elsa’s shoulder. I’m not forgetting, she said. I just think that maybe we could eat sandwiches together now. Just because we couldn’t back then doesn’t mean we can’t forever, she said.
Ingrid was letting the past slip away as if it were nothing. It wasn’t fair. Elsa and Nolan had lugged their own personal sorrow around for years, not because they wanted to, but because it felt important. Ingrid couldn’t just make things good and easy because she willed it so. Elsa could not just make herself good.
You can yell at me, Ingrid said. Yell all you want. It’s good for you. Someday I’ll be gone and who else will you have to blame? It’s healthy for young people to yell at old people. Ingrid settled into her place and smiled. But let’s eat, she said. The past is no reason not to have sandwiches.
Elsa sat down.
They ate sandwiches.
When she was small, Elsa had wanted to put her family back together like an unshattered vase, Ian and Ingrid and the farm and her pony. And now here were Nolan and Ingrid and Elsa. That this iteration of happiness would be offered had not been foreseeable, but Elsa decided she should not balk.
Ingrid, Nolan, Elsa.
It was a surprise that made time feel more malleable than Elsa had considered possible. Made it feel less like their lives were some sad equation strung out from left to right with a blinking equal sign at the end. And if she could untether herself from what seemed inevitable, from her own inevitability, maybe Elsa would find other possibilities. Surprise herself. Maybe there was a difference between ignorance and forgetting. Maybe the past was no reason not to do anything at all.
That night, Nolan slept in Elsa’s room and Elsa slept with her mother, who spooned her aggressively. The sheets smelled like cedar and lavender.
Ingrid had always fallen asleep quickly, exhausted from work.
Was there something of Duck Twelve about Ingrid? Her calm acceptance and good cheer had always infuriated Elsa. But no, Ingrid wasn’t ignorant.
If anything, she was the opposite.
Every day, Ingrid tended to the dying of Earth. She cleaned pockets of rotten flesh, and stripped beds wet with shit, and was often yelled at for the trouble. Ingrid stared the dying and their mistakes in the face and refused to believe in an afterlife because of her conviction that what we had here was enough. In spite of the meanness and squalor doled out to the lives she saw in hospice, this planet, she thought, was worth it. Eating your second-favorite ice cream flavor the day before you died young was worth it. Loving someone and then having him hate you and leave was worth it. Changing bedpans and holding people who tried to claw at the soft yellow bruises around their own IVs was worth it. Because there was also the tenderness of the vein. The years before he left. The child who came of strawberry just as she would have from chocolate.
Elsa knew that tomorrow they would make margaritas and watch the birds on the lake—the one Ingrid called Potato Lake, which was what the settlers had called it, because it looked like a potato, though obviously the Ojibwe had called it something else, and before the Ojibwe it had existed with no name at all, because it was a fucking lake. When developers bought the lakefront they renamed it Peeper Pond, which was what it was called now, and all the little houses the developers had built were laid out in orderly flat-roofed rows. The old houses—the Eriksons’, the Michaels’, her mother’s—had roofs extremely peaked, ready to shed snow in great, tumbling sheaves that parents warned children away from in winter. The relative flatness of the new houses’ roofs meant they would cave in on themselves come wintertime. If not this year, then next. When the new people’s roofs did cave in, it was Ingrid who would show up with a shovel, ready to dig them out.
There was always some good work to be done, so why not do it and fall asleep exhausted? Why not make that look easy to a person like your daughter?
Or maybe it was easy.
If you chose it, maybe the gravity of the present moment was irresistible.
Nolan sat up in bed, hair in his face. Elsa was sitting on the floor. She had the plastic tiger float out and she was blowing into it.
I was sleeping, he said.
Up now, Elsa said.
People always say that the newly awoken look like children, but Nolan did not. He was shirtless and there were creases on his face and lovely purple swaths beneath his eyes, as if all the exertion of the island were only now catching up with him. He slid up and leaned against the washed-wood headboard.
Elsa put her mouth to the rubber stopper and blew again.
What are you doing?
Elsa shrugged as if it was obvious and kept blowing.
Do you need help? Nolan said.
Come outside, she said.
They stood by the lake. The moon was swollen and battered-looking. She hung brightly above the water as if to admire her own reflection, all pocks and cratered scars. There was a wooden lifeguard’s chair up the beach, a sign nailed to its back informing them that no one was on duty to save them. From the grasses along the shore, one cricket trilled, an embarrassed, lonely sound. Anybody. Anybody. The sand was coarse and stuck to the children’s feet as they left prints in the smooth expanse of the shore.
Nolan finished inflating the tiger. Heaving his breath into it so the animal was full of him and full of Elsa too. His limbs grew, his claws and face popped free, his neck straightened. The tiger’s pink and orange and purple stripes seemed less garish in the moonlight.
Nolan plugged the rubber stopper in the tiger’s side.
Elsa wore Ian’s Beethoven shirt and cotton shorts. Nolan was in a hoodie and boxers, his hair tied back. Elsa took the tiger. The sand was silty and cold. The way into the lake was shallow but she didn’t have to wade very far to push the tiger in. She released him, and he drifted out. Nolan pulled Elsa back to shore. He led her to the lifeguard’s chair and hoisted her up. From their new height, they could see the tiger being pulled toward the heart of the lake.
A real Viking’s funeral, said Elsa.
This is better.
He would have hated it.
Well, I love it, Nolan said. And funerals aren’t really for the dead anyway. Who cares what they want.
That’s true, Elsa said.
They watched the tiger getting sucked out to where he was heading, a circuitous route full of tangents and diversions. Nolan fumbled in his hoodie pocket for his phone. He woke it up and the tiny light seemed crass to Elsa.
Put that away, you fucking millennial.
I want to show you something.
Seriously, now? Elsa said. The stars seemed alarmingly close. The bugs were rattling. Their father was dead. Not now.
I saw it right before I went to bed. We missed less news than I thought, Nolan said. I thought there’d be so much to catch up on but it was mostly the same old things. Except for this.
Elsa took the phone from him.
It was a video. A rocket launch. Elsa watched as the shuttle vaulted into space. She’d seen launches before, but soon she realized it wasn’t the shuttle she was meant to be watching. It was the rocket propelling it.
While the shuttle was still going upward, soaring off, the detached rocket, instead of dropping away like so much spent trash, turned back on the same fiery trail it had traced in ascent. It looked like a bomb or a fairy in a cartoon—a glowing orb, plummeting—and as it approached, Elsa felt sure she was about to see an explosion.
What is this? I don’t want to see this, Elsa said, shoving the phone at Nolan, but he shoved it back.
Watch, he said.
The rocket was returning. It had reversed course by design and was headed for a landing pad set out in the sea. And as the rocket came home, a chrysanthemum of flame, half menacing, half celebratory, blossomed from the pad and then slowly dimmed. The rocket on the landing pad came into focus once more, standing whole. There was cheering. The video cut out.
What the fuck was that? Elsa said.
Reusable rockets. Space-Gen has been making them. Their first successful launch was this week.
Elsa tapped and watched from the beginning again, the screen of Nolan’s phone glowing softly over her face.
Why are you showing me this? Are you teasing me?
They’ll send it back up again. That exact same rocket. They say it’s going to cut the cost of space travel by ninety-five percent.
Rockets falling along their own paths, then launching out again.
Elsa laughed.
Ninety-five percent meant, sure, she wasn’t going to Mars, but someone was. Someday.
She read the article below the video. In the photos, Space-Gen’s CEO looked tired but young. Hardly old enough to run a business. But there he was, saying they would have manned missions to Mars by 2035. Maybe sooner. Construction of the tunnel systems in which the colonists would live would start via robotic builders in the next five years. To settle Mars, the young CEO said, was the obvious choice. It was an expansion of the human experience. And it would happen in his lifetime.
Elsa’s lifetime.
I wonder if St. Gilles will find out about this, Nolan said.
Elsa thought of St. Gilles out on the island, surrounded by his books. Destroying the Earth in his pages over and over again. He would not hear about this, and Elsa thought that he might never even imagine it. Despite being the creator of whole worlds, despite being a famous and culturally beloved establishment, Remy St. Gilles would fail to imagine something so simple as this: a rocket not undone by its journey.
This was how Mars would happen, and it wasn’t Remy who had done it, or Mitchell, or their father. It was the young CEO. It was Nolan and Elsa. It was all of them, miserable millennials, who understood that it wasn’t about going forward or back. Who wanted to blow the whole thing open. To make the world a wider, greater vessel with room to hold more and different things.
Most of them would stay on Earth and fail at fixing it the best they could, but some of them would go to Mars. James Peacock maybe, Elsa thought.
James would travel in a Space-Gen shuttle, flying as high as the school jungle gym and higher. And when James Maxwell Peacock ascended as far as Mars, he would not plant a flag, Elsa thought, but he would cry all their names out loud.
The tiger was now bobbing out toward the center of the lake. Elsa told Nolan about the sounds the spheres would have made had she gone to Mars. The cozy claustrophobia of her bunk. The packets of food they would have rehydrated. How she imagined it would have felt to be weightless. Not unlike floating in the Gulf, maybe. Buoyant in her body.
Nolan told Elsa about sneaking into the stadium at night. The long shadows of giants. The turfy smell and red clay like blessings.
They talked about these things and they did not talk about Ian.
As the unbound tiger drifted, the children let each other forget him. Not forever, but for tonight. They forgot his dog snoring in the house and they forgot the bump in his nose and forgot the way he twirled his pencil when he listened to music. They forgot what he had told them was true about the world and how to be in it. Because those things were heavy, and they did not need to carry them all the time. Older people were always handing younger people things to carry, things they said it was important to bring forward. But maybe if Nolan and Elsa Grey could lay these down, if they could forget for just a little while, they might finally be able to get somewhere.