It’s hard, sometimes, reconciling the difference between what you really feel about something and what you think you’re supposed to feel.
Like when you’re sitting in the high school auditorium watching your sister onstage dressed like a freaky cat/human hybrid, singing and slinking around and licking her furry arms. And you know you should be proud of her, because she’s your sister and it’s one of the lead roles. And you are, sort of, but you’re also really tired of sitting there watching this incredibly stupid musical where nothing makes any sense, and you wish the freaking Jellicle cats would just hurry up and get to the Jellicle Ball or maybe be run over by a Jellicle truck so you can go home and zone out with your PlayStation.
Or when you open your Christmas present and find socks and underwear. And you know you should be grateful, because you were down to only four pairs of boxers that fit, and you were occasionally going commando on the weekends because you forgot to bring your laundry basket down. But instead you think about all the other gifts you would have rather had, and why bother to wrap up socks and underwear in the first place?
Or when someone dies, someone close to you, and you know your heart should hurt, like it should be about to explode, but instead it’s more of a dull ache in the background.
Don’t get me wrong, I was sad that Papa Kwirk was gone. But I also felt like I wasn’t feeling sad enough. Like there was a prerequisite amount I was supposed to be feeling, a kind of grief quota, and I was coming up short. I knew Cass had been up all night crying. I could hear her through the walls, could hear my mother’s voice comforting her. But that was Cass. Some people wear their emotions on their sleeves. Cass made entire outfits out of her feelings and put on a fashion show. But even Lyra woke up puffy eyed the next morning, and she had the fewest memories of Papa Kwirk of any of us.
And I did feel something, a sort of hollowness, but I had to stop and think about it. And even then, it wasn’t so much missing my grandfather as imagining what might have been, thinking about the Christmases to come and knowing that I wouldn’t hear him roaring into the driveway or be able to smell the spicy cigar smoke from outside my open window above the porch. And though my stomach twisted and my throat tightened, I never managed to cry.
I wondered if Dad was struggling with the same thing. His forehead was slightly more furrowed, and he was a little quieter than usual, but he didn’t seem to be overwhelmed with grief. Could you be underwhelmed with grief? Was that a thing? And if so, what would it look like? Maybe it would look like my father, waking up early that Saturday morning, showered and dressed before any of us, clapping his hands and issuing orders, acting as if we were going camping for the weekend and not to our grandpa’s funeral.
“Come on, Kwirks. Hop to it. We’ve got a busy day. I want to be on the road by noon, if possible.”
We were scheduled to arrive at Aunt Gertie’s that afternoon, which meant Saturday morning would be filled with cleaning and packing. Over a jelly-beanless breakfast of oatmeal with our own special toppings (slivered almonds for Cass, shredded coconut and sliced banana for Ly, good old-fashioned brown sugar for me) and the last of the actual milk, I overheard Mom tell Dad she had to run to work to get a few things sorted out. Cass and Lyra were arguing over whether or not coconut was technically a fruit or a nut, which was driving me crazy because who even cares, so I ambushed Mom and asked if I could tag along. It was better than listening to my sisters bicker or helping Dad straighten the house.
Besides, I knew she would turn the sky on if I asked her, and I kind of needed the distraction.
“Is your room clean?” she asked.
I was twelve. My floor was covered in at least three layers of comic books and clothes. “Pretty much,” I lied, which seemed to satisfy her. She obviously had bigger things on her mind.
I crawled into the back seat of Mom’s car, a Ford Expedition that we nicknamed the Tank. My mother never drove anything but the Tank. And she never let me or Lyra sit up front, even if we were the only ones riding along, because we were “statistically safer” in the back. I tried to tell her that it would take a collision with an actual tank to even put a dent in this thing, but she insisted. She wouldn’t even pull out of the driveway until my seat belt was fastened.
Mostly my mother’s constant worrying was an inconvenience. Like being the only kid who had to wear mittens in the winter because technically they kept your fingers warmer than gloves, even though it made it impossible to zip up your coat or tie your shoes. Or being the only kid at the pool who had to reapply sunscreen every time they got out of the water. Or not being allowed to even try the crossbow your grandfather got you for Christmas, even though knowing how to use it would come in handy during a dystopian government takeover. (She’d be sorry when the Reaping started and I didn’t step up and volunteer as tribute in Lyra’s place.) Of course she only worried so much because she loved me. At least that’s what she said.
Twenty minutes of boring talk radio later, we turned into the entrance for the Verizon Planetarium, where my mother worked. Up until four years ago it had been called the Cannon Planetarium, named after famous astronomer Annie Jump Cannon. But the university needed money for renovations and the telecommunications company didn’t have enough buildings with its name on it, so the university renamed it. My mother still called it the Cannon Planetarium, though. It was her second home.
She parked the Tank by the back door and I followed her to her office, a tiny little room that sat next to the janitor’s closet. The sign on the door read Molly Kwirk, Director of Operations and had a picture of her from back when her hair was long and curly. Inside, the top of her desk was spotless as always, and I couldn’t imagine what work she could possibly have to get done. I looked around for anything out of place; it was kind of a personal challenge. My mother liked things tidy, and if I ever picked something up and put it back down right where I found it, she invariably came up behind me to make some minor adjustment.
Not that there was much to mess with. Only two things hung on the wall between the bookshelves: her college diploma and an autographed photo of Sally Ride. Mom was nine when Sally Ride became the first American woman in space, and from that moment on, Mom was smitten: with Sally, with space, with all of it. While my father was humming the opening tune to He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Mom was out in her backyard in the hammock, staring up at the sky, wishing on stars. She wanted to be the first woman to walk on the moon.
And she might have tried, if she weren’t afraid to fly. Terrified, really. And if you can’t even stand to be on an airplane, there’s little hope of you blasting off in a rocket at twenty-five thousand miles an hour. Our family only took road trips, preferably in a giant SUV that could withstand a mortar attack.
So with no hope of ever becoming an astronaut, she did the next best thing: she brought the stars to her, getting her degree in astronomy and landing a job at the local university’s planetarium, eventually working her way up to director, which meant she pretty much ran the joint. It made take-your-kid-to-work day tough. Go with Dad to the candy factory or with Mom to explore the universe. Cass and Lyra always choose Dad.
Mom placed her Bag of Holding on the desk. That was the name given to her purse (the Kwirks have a weird habit of naming things), a huge canvas sack with half a dozen compartments that contained pretty much anything you could ever need in an emergency: a packet of rubber bands, protein bars, an LED flashlight, a mini stapler, enough hand sanitizer to fill a bathtub. The bag probably weighed forty pounds. My mother’s biceps were hard as rocks.
“I’ve got maybe twenty minutes of work. I’ll try to be quick,” she said. “Do you want to hang out here with me or would you rather—”
I nodded before she could finish the sentence. She really didn’t need to ask.
The planetarium didn’t open to the public until noon, and the graduate students who ran it wouldn’t show for another hour, at least, which meant I would have the galaxy to myself. I found my favorite seat, front row across from the exit, and tilted my chair back as far as it would go, staring up at the empty dome.
“You want audio?” Mom asked.
I shook my head. I didn’t need Neil deGrasse Tyson or Morgan Freeman telling me about dark matter and gravity and cosmic expansion; I’d heard it all before. I just wanted the sky to light up.
My mother pressed a few buttons, and it did. Exploding. Instantly. Like the Big Bang. Like the dawn of everything.
“All right, kiddo. I’ll come get you when I’m done.”
I nodded again and watched her retreat to her office while the ceiling expanded at the speed of light, suddenly somehow containing the entire Milky Way. I let out a held breath and immediately began to identify the stars I knew, tracking them by the constellations they were part of. I pinpointed Venus. I traced the handles of the dippers and the path of the dog star back to his tail. The Great Square of Pegasus. The eye of the bull.
I don’t know how many Saturday mornings I’d spent here, sometimes with my sisters but just as often on my own. It was nothing like the night sky outside my window, hazy and washed out by streetlights. In here, it seemed like you could see for infinity. Under the light of untold numbers of stars, billions of years could pass by, or time could stop entirely. I really had no idea. I just stared. And wondered.
But even with one of my favorite distractions, I still thought about Papa Kwirk. In fact, I might have thought about him even harder, lying there under the dome of stars. Papa Kwirk didn’t understand the point of planetariums and often teased my mother about her job. Why bother with projections and pictures when you can go outside and experience the real thing for yourself? That’s what he’d said. I’m sure he felt the same way about my father’s work. All those artificial flavors. Trying to re-create something that already exists. You want fried chicken, go eat some fried chicken.
But what Papa Kwirk didn’t seem to get . . . what I came to realize . . . was that sometimes the real version of things is disappointing. Occasionally a real cherry could taste bitter or rotten, but a cherry-flavored jelly bean tastes sweet every single time. I couldn’t always find the North Star when I looked outside my window, but I could always spot it here.
Here, I could count on it being right where it belonged.
“Did you find you yet?”
Mom’s voice tore me out of my trance. Surely it couldn’t have been twenty minutes already, but there she was, clomping down the stairs in her boots and taking the seat right next to me, stretching out her long legs and staring up at the computer-generated sky. My mother’s jeans were worn at the knees. All her jeans were like that. Seemed odd to have jeans with holes on the one hand and an office without a speck of dust on the other.
Silently I pointed at Betelgeuse on my right shoulder, Rigel in my left foot. I traced the stars along my famous belt—Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. The belt was the key. “Find the belt and you find the man,” my mother used to tell me when she first started to teach me the names of the shapes in the sky. I’m so much easier to find than either of my sisters. It’s one of the few things I get to hold over their heads.
“Your grandfather thought I was crazy, naming you all after constellations,” Mom said, mentioning Papa Kwirk for the first time since we’d left the house. “He thought you should be named after him.”
Francis Kwirk. That could have been me. Instead she named me Orion. Orion, Cassiopeia, and Lyra. Her three precious constellations. A lot of people think my name is cool. Kids at school with names like Mike and Andrew and David. They say they’re jealous. But those people don’t have to explain how their names are spelled all the time or get told that they come from outer space.
“How about it?” Mom asked. “Would you rather have been named Francis?”
I shook my head. There are probably a million other names that I would have chosen over Orion—like Mike or Andrew or David—but Francis isn’t one of them.
“That’s what I thought too.”
Mom clasped her hands behind her head. She had seen this same sky a thousand times more than me, and yet she still looked at it with wide, wonder-filled eyes.
“When the Greek heroes died, the gods granted them a place among the stars,” she said, channeling her own inner Carl Sagan, though I didn’t mind it coming from her. “Orion was a skilled hunter. At least until he ran into that stupid scorpion.”
Right. Scorpio. My archnemesis. I suppose Mom could have named me that. Then at least I could have made a cool costume and tried to take over the world.
“Your grandfather was a hunter, you know,” she continued. “Like Orion. At least that’s what your father tells me. Though, let’s be honest, your grandfather was a whole lot of things.”
I glanced at her, waiting for her to tell me like what, to fill in some of the gaps. I already knew Papa Kwirk was a biker. A smoker. An avid fisherman. I knew that he was a widower at the age of thirty-five. That he raised my father by himself after that. That he was a Vietnam War veteran and that he nearly died while he was over there. I knew that he also almost got arrested for peeing off the Great Wall of China and that his favorite snack was beef jerky and that he lived in the same Midwestern town for most of his life. I knew that he was a prankster, and he knew a million bad jokes but never flubbed a punchline.
And apparently, he liked clowns. Or at least trusted them to be the bearers of bad news.
I guess I actually knew a lot about him, but I didn’t really feel like I knew him.
I waited, but my mother didn’t have more to add to the Papa Kwirkopedia. Or at least she wasn’t about to volunteer anything. Instead she went back to the sky. She began tracing the patterns of constellations through the stars with the tip of her finger. “Sheesh. You really have to stretch your imagination to see some of these, don’t you?” she said. “I mean, yours I get. And I can kind of see Leo. But how do you get a crab out of an upside-down Y? Honestly. It could be anything. They could have called it a horse or a bird or a tower. But a crab?”
I nodded my agreement. That’s the way I felt about most constellations, Cass’s especially. It’s supposed to look like a queen, but it pretty much just looks like a toddler’s first attempt at drawing a W. Of course, I didn’t really get Cass either, and I’d known her my whole life. “I think people probably just look up there and see whatever they want to see,” I said.
“Yeah. You’re probably right.”
We lay there for another minute, making shapes out of clusters of stars, and a question wormed its way up and out, one that I’d been working on all morning but had really been itching me since I’d been sitting there. I scooted a little closer to Mom. “Can I ask you something?”
“Always,” she said.
“Do you really think that when we die, we go up there? I mean, not up there. But, you know . . . up there.” I pointed. Past the dome. Past the building. Past the clouds that lay beyond it. I knew better, of course. We call them the heavens, but outer space is just outer space. It’s hydrogen and helium and cosmic rays. But part of me liked the idea of Papa Kwirk still being out there. Somewhere. Watching over us.
Mom thought about it for a moment; she folded her hands over her heart. “Yeah. I think so,” she said. “I mean, if you stop to consider it, we all come from stardust. Which means there’s a piece of the very beginning, even the most infinitesimal trace of it, somewhere inside you. Inside everybody. And I think somehow, eventually, we all get back to it as well.”
“Eventually. Like in a billion years?”
“Well, if we are being honest, I don’t think anyone will be around in a billion years to know. But I do think the Greeks were on to something with their silly shapes. That our actions somehow outlive us and that we will all be remembered, somehow. Just maybe not through random connect-the-dots in the sky.”
I nodded. It was a good enough answer for now. I’d have to think about it some more. There was another equally pressing question. “Can I ask you something else?”
“Shoot.”
“Why a clown?”
My mother turned to me and shrugged.
“There are some mysteries in the universe that defy all rational explanation,” she said.
The look she gave me suggested that my grandfather was one of those mysteries.
When we got home from Mom’s office—after a quick stop at the Target to get me a nice shirt and a pair of dress pants—the suitcases were waiting for us in the driveway. Dad and Cass were barking at each other (not literally, of course, though with this family, you could never be sure). I could hear them through the open door, though I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
“Wonder what that’s all about,” Mom said with a sigh, but by the time she got out of the car, Cass was already storming out of the house, pulling furiously at the ends of her frizzy brown hair.
“Dad says I can’t take Delilah.”
Delilah. Of course.
Delilah was Cass’s pet python. Five and a half feet long and thicker than my arm (which isn’t saying much, I suppose). Mom’s allergic to cats and dogs and rabbits and guinea pigs—pretty much anything with fur. She’s afraid of tarantulas, and birds had spooked her ever since she was a young girl and an owl stole her favorite knit cap right off her head. This limited our choices for family pet. But even if Cass had been able to pick any animal in the world, I’m pretty sure she would have picked a snake of some kind. It was the closest thing to having her own pet dragon, which was what she really wanted.
My mother tried to reason with her. “Sweetie. Delilah will be fine. She just ate last week, right? You can keep her warming rock on. She has plenty of fresh water.”
“Yeah, but what about me? I need her, Mom.”
I rolled my eyes. What sixteen-year-old girl doesn’t need her pet python around all the time? Mostly, Delilah stayed in Cass’s room, secure in her terrarium, and I didn’t have to think about her, but there were evenings I’d come downstairs and find Cass in the recliner, book in hand, the snake wrapped around her neck, its thick diamond-shaped head pointed at the page as if it was reading along. Sometimes I wished it’d give her a good squeeze, just to see the look on Cass’s face, but somehow my sister and that snake had an understanding. She would feed it dead mice, and in return it would humor her by not strangling her to death.
“It’s only three days,” Mom said.
“It’s not like we don’t have room in the car,” Cass countered. “Besides. Grandpa liked Delilah. He would have wanted her to come. To say goodbye.”
That was true. During his annual visit, Papa Kwirk would often take Delilah out and dance with her around the living room. They gave each other kisses. He sang her old rock-and-roll songs. I kept expecting the python to try and bite his knobby old nose off; it sort of looked like a mouse, after all—the hairs that shot out of it reminded me a little bit of whiskers, at least.
“Fine. But you absolutely cannot bring him to the funeral. I doubt reptiles are allowed in the church.”
Cass hugged my mother and ran back into the house while I helped heft the suitcases into the back of the Tank. Less than a minute later, Dad was standing on the porch where Chuckles had stood the night before, singing about counting worms.
“You said she could bring the snake?”
My parents seldom overrode each other, especially when it came to us kids. Ninety-nine percent of the time they formed a unified front. But on the rare occasion when they did disagree, my mother always won.
“Her grandfather died,” Mom replied. “She’s upset. Delilah comforts her. Just think of it as her bringing a favorite stuffed animal. Except instead of a teddy bear, it’s a python. And instead of being stuffed, it’s a living, breathing, cold-blooded killer.”
Dad didn’t seem convinced. He stood there with his arms crossed.
“Like it or not, Delilah’s part of the family. And this is a time when our whole family should be together. Lord knows it doesn’t happen that often anymore.”
Mom was right. Between her and Dad’s work schedules, Cass’s rehearsals, my soccer practices, and Lyra’s after-school clubs, we were lucky to even get around the dinner table at the same time most days—but that still didn’t mean we needed to take the snake with us to Illinois. Not that I had any say in it.
Dad caved. “Fine. Just as long as she doesn’t let it loose inside the car again,” he said. The last time Delilah took a road trip with us, she had gotten stuck under the driver’s seat, and we had to pull over at a gas station to get her out. The look on the face of the lady pumping gas next to us made it worth it, though. “I told Gertrude we would be there before dinner, so we should hit the road. Are you packed yet, Ri?” Dad added, looking at me.
“Pretty much,” I said, once again meaning not in the slightest.
I ran upstairs, found an empty backpack, and threw whatever cleanish-smelling underwear and T-shirts I had inside. I also packed my deodorant, a toothbrush, a stack of comic books, and my 3DS. I threw in a bag of gummy bears (from Kaslan’s Candy Factory, of course—all perfectly normal flavors), a water bottle, and three extra pairs of socks. Sweaty socks drive me bonkers.
I would have packed my new tactical combat knife if Mom had let me fish it out of the attic. I was going to my first-ever Kwirk family funeral, after all.
There was no telling what might go down.