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Sunday at Seven
Episode 1 of 3 of New Earth Tonight by Rebecca Sorensen · free to read
The laptop went against the sugar canister, screen tilted up, the way Otis used to prop it. I set my tea beside it and opened the family app at 6:58.
The connect screen said STATION RELAY in plain gray letters, and under it a clock waited at 20:00.
At seven exactly, my daughter appeared in her bunk room. Behind her, the round window held the Earth, blue and white and nearly full.
“Hi, Mom,” Carla said.
I waved anyway, because I had learned to wave late.
“Hi, honey. You look tired.”
One one-thousand, two one-thousand, a little more, and then her face moved.
“Long shift. How’s your blood pressure?”
I used to teach the lag to ninth graders with a flashlight and a tape measure. Light covers a hundred eighty-six thousand miles a second. The Moon is about two hundred thirty-nine thousand miles out. So 1.3 seconds each way, and 2.6 before any answer can come home.
“Since when do you ask about my blood pressure?”
“Since you stopped telling me,” she said.
That was fair. I told her about the doctor, the new pill, the twenty dollar copay. I told her Fran Albright had pinned up another picture of her window in the junior high front hall.
“Thirty-three now. One every Monday. The kids stop and look on their way to lunch.”
Carla smiled, but the smile came late, and then it stayed too long. That was the lag too. Nothing on that screen ever moved at the right time.
“Mom, about Friday.”
“Fifty-two eighth graders. Twenty minutes. Fran has the big screen in the gym.”
“What if the relay’s down that day?”
“Then I’ll stand up there and explain the relay. I’ve done worse with less.”
My lamp and the foam ball on a pencil were already in the tote bag by the door. Thirty-one years, and I still packed my phases demo five days early.
She laughed, and I waited for it to reach me. When it did, it was the old laugh from the back seat of our station wagon.
The clock in the corner said 11:40.
“Don’t keep me over tonight, Mom,” Carla said.
“I’ll keep you as long as I like.”
“They give us a hundred minutes of personal video a month. I spend every one of them on you. Over that it’s fourteen dollars a minute, and the station cuts you off at twenty-five anyway.”
At Easter I had kept her on three extra minutes. I paid forty-two dollars to hear my daughter say goodnight twice, and I would have paid it again.
“Turn a little,” I said. “I want the window for Fran.”
She shifted. The Earth slid into the middle of the frame, bright as a dinner plate. A comma of cloud sat over the ocean, the same as it had looked every week lately. I hit the screenshot key.
“So you can see home,” Carla said. She always said that.
“I can see home. I’m sitting in it. I want to see you.”
Two point six seconds.
“You’re seeing me.”
“You’re thin. Are they feeding you?”
“The food is fine. Everything is fine. Tell me about the garden.”
“The tomatoes are done,” I said. “The squirrels got the last four. The forecast keeps promising frost and never delivers.”
“Did you cover the basil?”
“With your father’s old sheet, the one with the anchors on it.”
She asked more questions than she used to, about the basil, the furnace, the neighbor’s dog.
When I said the eighth graders were building a model of the station out of shoeboxes, she looked down at her hands.
“Tell them it’s not that big.”
“I’ll tell them about the lag,” I said. “Light doesn’t lie. It’s just slow.”
“I know, Mom. You said it every year.”
The clock went red at one minute, and we did what we always did. She said she loved me, and I said it back over the top of her, and we laughed at the collision.
“Look up tonight,” Carla said.
The screen went gray before I could answer. CALL ENDED.
I rinsed the mug and wheeled the trash cans down to the curb, because Monday was pickup and Otis was not there to do it. Five winters now.
The Moon was coming up over the roofs across the street. Full, orange, enormous, the way it always looks near the horizon.
I stood at the curb with one hand on a lid.
Phases are complementary. When I see a full Moon, the Moon sees a new Earth, its night side turned toward her, nearly black.
The Sun was setting behind me. The Moon was rising in front of me, lit all the way across. That put the Earth between them, showing the Moon its dark half.
From the near side, the Earth never rises or sets. It hangs in one spot and changes its face. Tonight the face should have been dark.
I went inside and opened the screenshot on the laptop: blue ocean, white comma of cloud, lit edge to edge.
So what was lighting the Earth behind my daughter?