The hospital was white. White, white, white, everywhere I looked. White like the moon. White like the tail of a comet, the white of a meteor exploding under atmospheric pressure. Blindingly white.
Cash must have hated it there.
A nurse was standing by his bed, tapping something into a little electronic device that she slipped into her pocket when we came in. She squished an IV bag around and adjusted a blanket under his chin, smiling at us the whole time.
“He’s been resting comfortably,” she whispered to Sarah on her way out, and Sarah nodded gratefully.
I stood in the doorway, trying to take it all in. The beeping machines and the hiss of something squeezing and releasing. The tubes and the wires.
And the tiny, white-haired old man resting in the bed, his head smashed flat against the pillow, his eyes closed, his lips pale. One socked foot poked out from under the blanket, but otherwise, he was covered from chin to toe, like a mummy. Like somebody who was already dead.
He didn’t even look like Cash. His skin was too thin, almost see-through, his breathing too labored and false, as if he were a machine man rather than a real human. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the breathing sound to be inside the helmet in his space room instead.
The force is strong with this one (one-one).
I waited for my brain to take over, to hear mission control telling Cash and me it was time to take off, to hear us checking and ticking off the systems and buttons in our space shuttle one by one. I tried to imagine us floating around in the space station. Anything.
But nothing would come. All I could see was the whiteness of his skin. The brightness of that dying star of a hospital room.
“It’s too bright in here,” I said, and was surprised to hear my own voice sounding gruff, like Cash’s. I walked over to the one window and yanked the curtains shut. Immediately the room dimmed. Better.
Cash’s eyes opened at the scrrr sound of the curtains closing.
“Kid,” he said. Groggy. Breathless.
I froze. “Hi,” I said. I even gave a halfhearted wave, and then felt like a big dork about it.
“He came by. He wanted to see you,” Sarah offered. She took a few tentative steps toward her brother’s bed but seemed half-afraid. “How are you feeling?”
He turned his head to look at her. A scowl creased his face. “How do you think I feel? Like running a marathon? I feel like I’m dying.”
She took a step back and turned her face to the floor. I thought I saw a tear gather on the tip of her nose, but she kept her hands clasped together in the folds of her skirt.
Slowly, Cash snaked a hand out from under his blanket. He motioned for me to come closer. I did.
“Listen, kid,” he started, but then for a long time he didn’t say anything else and it felt really awkward, so I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the paper with the Morse code songs on it.
“I’ve got a new message to send,” I said hopefully. “When you get out, we can send it up. I think we’re getting close.”
He shook his head impatiently. “Not gonna happen,” he said.
“Sure it is,” I said. “We’ve worked so hard, and I think Huey is really good—the best I’ve ever had, actually—and …”
He swiped at the paper in my hand. It tore on one edge and floated down to my feet. “I said it’s not gonna happen,” he said, his voice guttural and raspy, and began a coughing fit like none I’d ever heard out of him before. Now that I had a name for that coughing—cancer—it frightened me. “We’re not gonna make contact with Mars,” he finally said once he’d caught his breath again.
“I’ll wait until you’re better,” I said weakly, and it wasn’t until a tear gathered on the tip of my own nose that I realized I had been crying. “We’ll do it together.”
“Kid, listen to me,” he said. “I’ve devoted my whole life to the sky. My whole life. It cost me marriage, kids, pets, everything. I had nothing but what was up there.” He jabbed a weak finger toward the ceiling. “I spent every waking second studying what’s up there. I used up everything I’ve got on what’s up there. And you know what’s up there?”
I shook my head, sniffed, did the hiccup-cry thing that babies and annoying little kids do.
“NOTHING!” he boomed, so loud both Sarah and I jumped and a nurse poked her head through the door curiously. He coughed for a moment, the end sounding weedy and agonizing, like words spilling out of his mouth rather than just air. “Nothing,” he repeated more softly once he’d caught his breath and swallowed a few times. “There is nothing up there but rocks, and I wish more than anything that I’d given up on it when I still had time. I wish I’d paid more attention to life on Earth.”
He turned his head so his watery eyes were gazing right into my watery eyes, and for a second I thought maybe I saw something in them that I recognized. Something I’d seen in Mom’s eyes when she yelled at me to look both ways, or in Dad’s eyes when he’d told us about Las Vegas. It was like a mixture of fear and protection. And maybe … worry?
“That project we’ve been working on? That contraption with the mirrors? It’s all yours, kid,” he continued. “But do us both a favor. Take it up to the hill and destroy it. Smash it to bits. It’ll be just as useful destroyed as it is now. Destroy it and walk away and live your life.”
I shook my head. “I can’t …”
“You hear me, Arty?” Cash said. I bit my lip. This was the first time Cash had ever called me by my real name. “Give up on it while you still have a life. Stop wasting it on a pipe dream. You are never going to contact anyone on Mars or any other planet. You aren’t going to prove that there’s life out there. You aren’t going to do anything that will make any difference as long as you’re looking at life through a telescope. Give up. Before you turn into a pathetic, lonely old man dying alone on a plastic-covered mattress.”
He coughed again, loud and long—so long I worried he might never stop.
“You’re not alone,” Sarah said softly. “We’re here.”
But I didn’t want to be there anymore. I was crying like an idiot, and my insides felt hard and burned from his words. Give up? Just give up on everything I’d ever believed in? He was the first person who’d ever believed with me, the first person to ever understand why the sky was so important to me. And now he was telling me to just give up?
Worse, he was telling me to give up because … it was useless.
“Go,” he said, and when Sarah and I didn’t move, he barked it out again painfully. “Go! You’re always hanging around where you’re not wanted, kid! I didn’t ask for you to come to my house. I didn’t ask for you to break into my space room. I didn’t ask for any of it.”
Sarah and I locked eyes, with a should we go? type of look, and he coughed twice, winced like he was in great pain, and bellowed, “Get out of here, I said! Let an old man die in peace! Don’t you have the sense to know when you’re not wanted?”
My face burned with anger and confusion. It wasn’t fair what he was doing. I came here because I … because I loved him. And he was smashing my dreams to bits. “You don’t have any sense!” I yelled back, before my brain could catch up with my mouth. “You know that? You’re the one with no sense! You have cancer and you keep smoking those nasty things and you don’t even care that you’re going to die and … and leave people behind!”
I bent to pick up the paper he’d knocked out of my hand. A whole night’s worth of work, something I’d been so hopeful about just a few minutes before, now just felt like trash. I leaned over and dropped it into the wastebasket, then hurried to Sarah’s side as she made for the door.
“Arty,” Cash said. But I just kept walking.