The week of launch, Adri drank a special shake four times a day and ate bars laced with electromagnetic proteins in order to have her vitals monitored at all times. She dropped her exercise routine per Lamont’s instructions in order to, as the Institute put it, “rest, revive, spend time with your loved ones, and say good-bye.”
The launch was Sunday. Wednesday afternoon, Adri began to pack. She piled things onto her bed that would be disastrous to forget. She weighed her belongings on a scale the Center had provided. They were allowed twenty-five pounds for personal items—enough for clothes, a special piece of jewelry maybe or a favorite stuffed animal from childhood, things like that. She was saddened to see—looking at the scale—that she didn’t need to weed anything out.
Lily was quiet that afternoon. They played cards and mostly hid from the winter weather, watched TV, ate. They did nothing particularly worthy of a person’s last two days on Earth. Time was speeding up, and they couldn’t stop it.
Late that night they were watching a newscast about some political debate revolving around the observatories on the moon and who owned which territories. Adri was drifting off when Lily suddenly clutched her arm, her fingers digging in like claws.
“I remember.”
Adri tried to comprehend her, half asleep, focusing on the room.
But Lily only dug her fingers in harder. “I remember where the Electric used to be.”
Neither of them could stand to wait until morning.
They passed the place three times before they finally stopped; it was so easy to miss in the dark, surrounded by an old metal fence alongside the road. Adri had passed it many times on her runs: an unassuming lot overgrown with weeds and tall grass, with an ancient real estate sign (Commercially Zoned) dangling from the mesh of the fence. Climbing out of the car, Adri’s pulse sped up.
“They were supposed to build on it, before the 2020 economic reboot,” Lily explained, pulling her coat and hood tightly around her as they stepped over the leaning fence. The whole place was desolate, unprotected from the frigid wind. “I remember coming here as a kid, looking for old coins with a metal detector. We all used to do that. Somebody found a box full of silver dollars once.”
Lily walked deeper and deeper into the tall grass ahead of her. “Well, where do we start?” she asked. They gazed at each other, shivering, and then Lily looked at the ground around her feet and started beating back the tall grass. After twenty minutes they’d turned up three old Coke cans and a pair of bike tires.
“We’ll never find anything,” Adri said, knowing they were being ridiculous, because what were they looking for? Still, it was an eerie sensation to stand where the carnival used to be.
Finally, after another ten more minutes of shivering and searching, Adri sat down at the edge of the field, disappointed.
What had she expected to find? Skeletons wearing T-shirts with the names Catherine and Beezie? A crystal ball Professor Spero had left behind? It was funny, the things that lasted. Coke cans, glass, wire fences, rocks. The wind tugged at the hair that poked out beneath her hat.
“It had to be a hoax, huh? The Electric?” she said to Lily, who came and sat down beside her, pulling her teddy bear hat down tightly over her ears.
“Oh yeah.” Lily nodded. “Of course.”
She fiddled with the metal top of one of the Coke cans. “They all let each other down.”
“But people forgive each other. It’s like a dance,” Lily said.
“I wish I knew how to do that dance,” Adri replied.
“Oh,” Lily shook her head. “I don’t think it’s that you can’t do it. I think you’re thinking the whole thing is a lose-lose. Like, what if someone actually likes you? That causes all sorts of problems. Then each time you see them, you have to try and keep them. And then even if you manage that, you lose. You end up losing. Even if you go through all the work of accepting someone and occasionally looking like a fool in front of them and then figuring out if they can accept you and you can forgive each other for everything you screw up, you lose them eventually.”
Lily looked at her, her bear ears flapping in the breeze. “That’s why I think you don’t dance, Adri. I don’t think it’s that you don’t know the steps.”
Adri held her arms around herself, shivering.
“Do you think I can change?” she finally asked.
Lily looked at her, curious and thoughtful. “Well,” she replied, “are you dead?”
They smiled at each other, a slow unfolding.
“I’m freezing my boobs off,” Lily said.
Driving home, Adri thought about what Lily had said at the archives. Maybe she had let herself worry about Catherine and Beezie and Lenore because they couldn’t know or hurt her in return. But she was hurt. By how they had let one another down, and now their stories had vanished.
She thought about the night Catherine and Ellis had walked the same road home from the Ragbag Fair that they were driving now, trying to forgive each other. Her mind wandered to the wooden box, how Ellis had hidden it under his bed, always scared of things that were long past him. The following morning, it was still on her mind.
It was just another place she hadn’t looked, nothing promising. There was no reason there’d be anything important there. But the next morning Adri pulled a blanket over her shoulders and walked downstairs and outside.
She’d never ventured into the old bunkhouse—it was barely a building anymore. She hovered outside the door for a moment, then crossed into the darkness. It smelled like dirt and old hay. There was a wooden frame where a bed used to be, the slats now broken and caved in, the room full of webs and dark corners.
She made her way through the sticky webs, knelt beside the broken bed, and ran her hands underneath it.
She felt a slit in the earth, and brushed off the dirt to reveal the two loose planks, and pulled that off to reveal a small space, just a foot wide. The wooden box was still there—though it felt like it shouldn’t be, like something from a dream.
She opened the top and removed the contents slowly: a framed, grainy, black-and-white photo of a woman and her daughters. She knew them immediately: Beth—stern and proud, Catherine looking off at something to the side—an even-featured, quiet-looking kind of person but restless even as a still life—and Beezie, a hellcat for sure, with an enormous hungry grin on her face like she wanted to swallow whoever was taking the picture. Beneath it, there was a bracelet woven out of straw, half disintegrated. And beneath that, letters. Adri lost her breath.
The top one was thick, nearly bursting from its envelope, written to Beth Godspeed from Lenore Allstock, and postmarked May 2, 1920, Cherbourg, France. The others were in a bundle, tied together with twine, and addressed to Ellis Parrish from Catherine Godspeed, who hadn’t died in the dust at all.
LENORE
PART 2
APRIL 30, 1920
Dear Beth,