I slept in my bunk that night, and he in his. Days passed and we kept working on the cell but made little progress. He came to the workshop late and left early. Often he wasn’t in the galley in the morning and on those days I drank my coffee and ate my cereal alone. When he was there he was different, his eyes unfocused and his movements slow. I asked him more than once if he was all right but he avoided the question, said he hadn’t slept well or that his foot had started hurting again. The hours he was absent increased and the workshop was cold and quiet without him, the tools and parts and stripped wires on the table inert. My days unspooled; time didn’t speed up and slip away anymore but seemed to spread out, long and loose and seemingly unending. The cell had not materially changed but felt different in my hands, as if the life had gone out of it.
At first I avoided Theresa’s room, even going the long way to my bunk. I tried to pretend she didn’t exist. But when I was alone her face invaded my thoughts. I would be pulling on a pair of wool socks or pouring a cup of coffee or separating a tangle of connectors in the cell, and she would appear—a white face against white sheets in a white room. At night in my bunk I’d hear the wind rushing outside and the silt rapping at the porthole, and I’d imagine her thin breath among the rustling sounds.
The door that concealed both the failing cells and her room was like a magnet. I started walking past it on my way to breakfast, and then on my way to bed. I hovered near it at odd moments. One day I opened the door—it was unlocked—and stood in the corridor listening. Then I closed it.
But the next day I went in. Theresa was alone and awake, and she asked me to stay. After that I went to see her every day. I asked her about the cell, and the components she and James had worked on together, about her time at Peter Reed, and about what it was like to work with my uncle. But she didn’t want to talk about those things. She wanted to talk about Earth. I’d been there less than a month ago, and she wanted to know everything about it, what I’d done, seen, eaten.
It feels like I’ve forgotten it, she said. Not what it looks like exactly, or sounds like. But what it feels like. When I was growing up the dirt in my backyard had little white spots in it and these green shoots that used to come up in spring. I can see them in my mind but can’t remember what they felt like. She held out her hand and rubbed her fingers together.
It was always too cold to dig in the earth at my aunt’s house, I said.
In the summer, she said. It wasn’t too cold in the summer.
I thought about this, tried to recall the warmer months when I was little, and an image appeared in my mind, of my uncle folding a paper airplane on the back steps. I felt the hot sun against the back of my neck. I saw the way his hands pressed the plane’s corners neat and flat.
I didn’t like being in the garden in the summer, I said. I was afraid of bees.
When you were home it was fall?
Yes.
Did the air smell like leaves?
I thought of the Candidate dormitory and the clean scent of the hallways. I shrugged. Outside it did—
Can you describe it?
I remembered leaving the chilly veterans’ hospital after visiting Amelia and walking into the warm air outside. My body felt loose and uncoordinated, my skin unprotected. My swollen feet were huge inside my shoes. I shuffled rather than walked on a sidewalk strewn with disintegrating yellow leaves, crushed by other people’s sneakers and boots.
I don’t know. I hesitated. Like decay.
She nodded and looked satisfied.
But the next time I visited her she was different. She barely raised her head when I came in and a sheen of sweat made her forehead shine. Her fingers creeped around on the top of her sheets. She didn’t answer when I spoke to her. Finally she asked for James, and I went and got him and left them alone.
The time after that was different too. She was up and out of her bed, pacing the room, her rumpled hair streaming down her back. Her eyes flitted wildly; she seemed to be talking to someone who wasn’t there. When she saw me she grabbed my arm and shook it, hard. She opened her mouth, gestured to her throat, and began to weep. I backed away, felt for the plastic in the doorway behind me. Then she picked up one of her slippers and threw it at me.
I didn’t understand it. The change in her, day by day. When she was back to her normal, lucid self, she didn’t seem to remember what she’d been like the day before. I started to believe what James had said. Maybe she was confused; maybe she didn’t really know what she wanted. Then one afternoon I went to see her and she wasn’t there.
I went looking for James and couldn’t find him either. Not in his bunk or in the workshop. Both rovers were parked in the darkness of the cargo bay. Outside the portholes the wind had picked up and the swirling pink silt created a thick haze.
I walked through the station with a strong sense of unease as the wind beat at the walls. I checked the galley, looked through all the equipment rooms and storage modules. Nothing. I went back to Theresa’s room, which was still empty. The wind quieted. Then out of the porthole I saw them, both of them. Their helmets were off. James’s eyes were closed against the silt, and Theresa’s long hair whipped around her face. They were breathing the air.