That night I woke at midnight and sat up in bed with a start, my head full of whirrings and scrapings. I had been running it in my mind as I slept, the cell. Slowly at first, it made a soft, familiar hum. Then quicker, moving through time at such a clip, at breakneck speed. Until the hum started to shudder and break.
One of my aunt’s paintings on the opposite wall loomed, a white canvas with swaying black lines. In the dim light the lines seemed to tremble like the cell had in my dream. I jumped out of bed, wrapped a blanket around me, and went into the hallway.
My aunt’s room was dark. I opened her door a crack and whispered, Aunt Regina? But she didn’t answer. I went inside and got close to the bed. Her head was in her hands on the pillow, her forehead smooth. One of the dogs, Reacher, was at the foot of the bed. He stretched out long and grunted. I said my aunt’s name again and her dark lashes fluttered but she didn’t wake.
I leaned on the bed and looked at the cracks in the ceiling. A hook. An arch. The number fourteen.
My aunt sat straight up. What?
She saw me. Oh June. You scared the— What’s the matter now?
Reacher lifted his head.
I can’t sleep, I said.
Go back to bed. Sleep will come.
Can I stay?
No.
Just for five minutes.
Reacher shook himself and bits of silky hair momentarily filled the air. He turned once in a circle and lay back down.
She sighed. All right.
Can I sit on the bed?
She moved over and I settled between her and the dog on a white comforter that smelled like down feathers.
She reached to rub her feet and moaned softly. My feet hurt.
Mine do too, I said.
I’m watching the clock, she said, and closed her eyes again.
Did they say anything more about Inquiry? I asked.
No. She pulled the comforter around herself.
I don’t know why anyone would want to be an astronaut, she said after a minute. They must always be hungry, or cold, or scared. Or all three at once.
I hadn’t thought about whether the crew were scared or cold or hungry. I carried their faces around in my mind, but those pictures were smooth and flat. I knew the facts of their lives on Earth and their jobs on the explorer. I knew what they could do, their abilities. But that was just information. Now I thought of them floating inside the compartments of the explorer, with empty stomachs, with cold hands and feet.
Time’s up, she said. Back to bed.
I didn’t want to go.
If you can’t sleep, read a book, she said. Or draw something.
For you?
All right. She laid her head on the pillow again. If you want to.
Back in my room I got some paper and a pen from my desk. In my mind I heard my aunt’s soft moan and I drew an invention that would help her. The idea was a wire basket with legs that could climb stairs so she wouldn’t have to run up and down them all the time. The drawing was detailed like my uncle’s schematics. It showed the invention from different angles, different positions. I hoped it would work. Then my aunt would admire it and say, Thank you June.
Whirrings and scrapings woke me every night that week. But I didn’t go back to my aunt’s room; I worked on my invention. At night I roamed the house to collect things. Parts from a dryer that didn’t work anymore, wiring from a broken remote control car, the telescoping neck of the lamp in my room. Bicycle spokes. Bolts and screws I’d hidden in my dresser drawers.
During the day at school, bored with math lessons I’d already taught myself a year or more ago, I filled sheets of paper with drawings of baskets and mechanical feet. At home I worked close to the TV, even though the reports on Inquiry said nothing new. I started to put the things I’d collected together, and then to take them apart and put them together in a different way. I wasn’t systematic. I tried one thing and then another until I’d built something that roughly resembled my picture—a haphazard-looking wire basket with metal and silicone feet, and a battery pack screwed to its underside.
To test it I built a makeshift staircase in my room out of old boxes and duct tape and set my invention in front of it. Its articulated metal feet stood flat on the carpet, its basket level with the first step. I pressed the up button on the remote control, and the machine clicked twice and lifted its foot. But the foot only hit the step, tuc, tuc, tuc, like it was trying to get through it rather than over it.
Tuc, tuc, tuc.
Tuc, tuc, tuc.
I took it apart and put it back together again. Over and over until it started to look nothing like my drawing, and I didn’t know if it was better or worse. I tried five toes instead of three. A high heel instead of a low one. The loops of wire like toenails were a problem, so I replaced them with plastic nobs unscrewed from the bottoms of the dining room chairs. The screws I’d used to fasten the basket to its legs were too short; I switched to bolts.
The basket started to do what it was supposed to do in a very ugly way. It hobbled up the stairs like a person who had half forgotten how to walk. It needed to be faster, smoother. I made it faster. That was easy. But I got stuck on smoother. There was something heavy about the way its metal feet hit the floor. It stomped when I wanted it to half walk, half fly. I drew hundreds of solutions but none of them satisfied me. My mind roamed the house to find better materials, into every room, closet, cupboard. Nothing was right. I was stuck, and I pushed the basket under my bed.