All stories › Science Fiction › New Earth Tonight › Episode 2
The Front Hall
Episode 2 of 3 of New Earth Tonight by Rebecca Sorensen · free to read
Nothing up there was lighting it, and the proof was pinned to a corkboard outside the junior high office.
I got there Monday at 7:40 with the new printout in a folder. Fran was at the front desk with a stack of permission slips and a pencil behind her ear.
“Fifty-one back,” she said. “One kid’s mother thinks the Moon is a hoax, so he’s in the library Friday.”
“That’s fifty-one, then.”
“Fifty-one. They want to know if Carla’s seen aliens. I told them to ask her themselves.”
Fran had been in my ninth grade earth science class twenty-six years ago. She got a C minus and wrote me a thank you card anyway. Now she ran the front office and a prayer chain of forty-one women, and every one of them knew my daughter’s name.
I had made sure of that. I told the newspaper. I told the bank teller. I told the man who fixed my furnace, and he said, “On the actual Moon?” and I said yes, the actual one.
“Go on and pin it,” Fran said. “You do it better than me.”
I stood in front of the board with the new picture in my hand.
Thirty-three printouts, in rows of six. The early ones from February showed a thin blue crescent of Earth. In March there was a half Earth, cut clean down the middle. In April the window was almost black, and I had thought the picture was bad.
It was not bad. It was a dark disk scattered with gold freckles. City lights, seen from the Moon, on a new Earth.
The Earth changed every week, all spring and into summer. Crescent, half, full, half, crescent, dark. Twenty-six Sundays of it.
Then it stopped.
The last seven were the same bright ocean, with the same comma of cloud curled the same way in the same place. I put Sunday’s printout beside them, and it made eight.
Weather does not hold still for two months. Neither does the light.
“You okay, Marge?”
“Just counting,” I said.
That night I sat at the kitchen table with my phone. Carla’s old number was still on my family plan, thirty-five dollars a month. She had asked me to keep it so she would not lose it.
On the Moon, there is no cell tower. A call to that number should have gone straight to a recording.
It rang.
Four rings, then her voice from a year ago, cheerful, telling me to leave a message.
I called again, and it rang out.
I called a third time. It was 11:10 at night, and a mother calling three times at 11:10 means somebody is dying.
“Mom? Mom, what’s wrong? Is it your heart?”
There was no lag, not even one one-thousand. Her answer came before I had finished saying her name.
For a while there was only a television through a wall on her end, and a truck going by.
“Where are you?” I said.
“Mom.”
“Carla. Where are you?”
She breathed in, and I knew that breath. It was the one she took at ten, before she told me she had broken the good serving bowl.
“In July the station doctor caught my heart skipping on a routine scan,” she said. “Down here it’s a pill. Up there it’s a ride home. They put me on the August supply flight. I was back before the next Sunday call.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you told everybody. You told the newspaper. You told Fran’s whole prayer chain. There’s a board with my face on it at your old school, Mom. I couldn’t be the one who came home early.”
“So you built a window.”
“The station gives you a recorded window for night cycle, when the shutters close. I saved one in May, on a full-Earth night. The company keeps me on medical leave, paid through February, so the app still works.”
“And the lag?”
“I counted. One one-thousand, two one-thousand, a little more. You taught me that.”
“I taught you that for a science fair.”
“You always said light doesn’t lie,” Carla said. “I figured I could just be slow on purpose.”
I looked at the window over my sink. The Moon was up over the garage, a night past full and still nearly round.
“Are you safe? Is your heart all right?”
“It’s fine. I take the pill. Mom, I’m so sorry.”
“Where are you, honey?”
She told me. A motel off the highway, sixty-one dollars a night, a room with a microwave and a framed picture of a lighthouse.
She had been forty miles away since early August.