One Last Earthset

He sat in the dome in the control room, monitoring the mining bots, pondering his future.

There wasn't much future to ponder. He'd been on the moon for seven months. Three months left on his contract. Williams and Deming were dead, killed while in a rover by the same meteorite storm that had taken out the oxygen-producing facility and the CO2 scrubbers.

Houston Control had been a contract facility for several years, owned by a corporation focused on the bottom line. He'd been surprised how long it took them to abandon rescue efforts after the aborted shuttle rescue. They held on to hope for quite a while longer than the bottom line would suggest was sensible.

They held on to hope, while at the same time, he gradually gained a purchase on reality. He wasn't going home.

He cycled through the outside monitors, watching the precise movements of the bots. He checked on the CO2 levels in the dome. Getting high. Soon, it would be time to suit up. With the oxygen available in the suits, he could hold out for another day or so, but not long enough for rescue.

He cued up the transmission from his son, watched it for the fiftieth time, and cried.

He decided to suit up early. He downloaded his son's video to his suit. He went through the airlocks, and outside.

He thought about taking one of the rovers to Mazatlan, the golf course, but he'd left his clubs inside. Instead, he walked south for several minutes to the first hole, and sat down, leaning back against a nearby boulder.

He thought about his divorce. He thought about that old line: "But it didn't MEAN anything!" It was true, really. That woman in Pensacola had meant nothing to him; she was nothing more than a way to scratch an itch. But she'd meant a lot to Cathy, oh yeah. Enough to end a marriage.

Tommy had been but seven years old when he moved out. For the first year, Tommy was brave, trying to act as if everything were normal, as if Daddy had just gone away temporarily. But by the time he was nine, he began distancing himself, and by twelve, he hated his father and wanted nothing to do with him.

He left for the moon on Tommy's twenty-third birthday.

He leaned more fully against the boulder, and watched the half-earth settling toward the horizon. He could see North America.

With a start, he realized he'd donned the wrong suit. He'd chosen the one with little oxygen left. He began to get up, intending to trudge back to the dome to get a suit with a full supply. But he stopped, and settled back against the boulder.

It just felt like the right time.

As earth touched the horizon, he brought Tommy's video up on his visor.

He saw Tommy's face, with his longish light brown hair and that silly little smile, the one he'd hardly seen through his teen years.

"Hi, Dad," he began. But tears filled his eyes, and he hung his head for a half-minute.

"I heard the news." He paused again to compose himself.

"I don't know if I can get through this, Dad, but I'm gonna try. I've been mad at you for a long time. When you hurt mom, I tried to deny it. But then I got to the stage where I was mad at you. Then I hated you. Then I tried to forget you."

Tears from Tommy again. Another pause.

"But when I heard the news, I found myself remembering what a wonderful dad you were during our time together. You always had time to play with me, you always had time to talk to me, and you always made me feel important. I wish I could have told you this before . . . the news, but I was still wrapped in anger."

"Dad, I know now that you left me with more than you took away. You screwed up. You hurt Mom, more than you know. But Dad . . ."

More tears.

"But Dad, you made me who I am. I'll always have you with me. Dad, I love you, and I'm sorry I ever quit telling you that."

He replayed the last part several times, until his breathing grew labored. He looked at the gauge. Zero.

He looked back toward the earthset. He reached to replay the video, but he couldn't move his arm. Soon, he realized he could no longer see.

But, he could still feel. He could feel himself smiling.




Prompted by Thom G's Three Word Wednesday.

Best Friend's Girl

I expected Dave to be pissed, but I didn't expect him to lurch through the door and knock me on my ass. "STAY AWAY FROM HER," he shouted. He slammed the door, and in a few moments, I heard his car speed away.

My dad came halfway down the stairs. "Doug, you okay?"
"Everything's okay, Dad."
He paused for a few moments, but went back upstairs.

Dave was my best friend. He was our star quarterback; I was his favorite receiver.

The hell of it was, Dave had caught Gwen and I hugging. That's it. Hell, I'd hugged her in front of him lots of times. She'd come to my house crying after she'd caught Dave kissing a cheerleader.

I'd never done more than hug Gwen. I wish I could say that it was out of loyalty to Dave. It wasn't. Dave boinked every girl he could get his hands on. Gwen was an amazing girl, and Dave was blind to her warmth, her intelligence, and her old-soul wisdom. The truth was that I never made a move on Gwen because I didn't want to risk losing her trust.

I was in love with Gwen. She was my real best friend, and the only person on earth who knew that I wrote poetry. She was also, to me, the most beautiful woman in the world.

Dave's parents called about eleven that night. Dave never made it home. Dad and I drove out toward the old mill, where Dave liked to go when he wanted to be alone. I felt frantic, fearful that something awful had happened.

We came upon Dave's Nova a half mile from the turnoff to the mill. It was wrapped around a telephone pole. Dad told me to stay in the car, but I followed him anyway. It was my first experience with the odor of death.

I went to pieces at Dave's funeral. Dad hugged me close, and I called him "Daddy." I hadn't called him that since I was eight.

The light went from Gwen's eyes. She was just as cordial and kind as ever, but her unique spark seemed to evaporate. We went to different colleges, and we lost contact, as if losing contact was the decent thing to do.

I thought about her during our high school ten year reunion. When she never showed up, I felt a strange combination of relief and disappointment.

Our twentieth reunion was different. I'd been divorced for three years, and I wanted to see her, to see if that spark she held in her eyes had returned. I was leaving when she walked in. At first, she looked different, but then she didn't. We talked for three hours there in the foyer, until nearly all of our classmates had left.

"I got divorced four years ago," she said.
"Three for me. Any kids?"
"No," she answered. "My ex didn't want kids."
"Mine either."

We talked until the hotel folks started giving us dirty looks. I walked her to her car, and she gave me her parents' number. I remembered it.

"You busy tomorrow?" she asked.
"Not at all," I answered.
"Want to go to brunch at the golf course?"
"I'd like that," I said.

We hugged a rather chaste hug, and I walked away.

"Doug?" I turned.
She walked toward me, slowly. She took my hands in hers for a moment, then put one hand behind my neck, and pulled me down to her.

She kissed me. It was not a chaste kiss.

It's four in the morning now. I'm meeting her in five hours, and I haven't slept a wink, because that kiss keeps replaying in my mind, over and over.

I'm not complaining.




Prompted by Thom G's Three Word Wednesday. Today's words are frantic, lurch, and odor.

Boogeyman

There he was, standing in the boy's restroom, leaning against a sink, smoking. The restroom was otherwise eerily empty.

I remembered the seventh grade. He was a grade ahead, taller, bigger, and stronger. He had a friend who was nearly as big, and together they would terrorize me, once even holding a knife to my throat.

I'd glimpsed him now and then in high school, but now, we were face-to-face.

He no longer scared me. I'd grown to six-four, I outweighed him by at least twenty pounds, and by God, he no longer scared me. I stood in the doorway, locking eyes with him. He didn't look scared, but he did look, well, concerned.

It was the ideal opportunity for revenge. I moved closer.

"Shit man, you got big." Now he looked just a little scared.

I remembered his knife against my neck. I felt my throat constrict. I heard my own blood pumping in my ears. I measured the distance to his nose, and imagined smashing it with the heel of my hand. I teetered on the edge of losing control.

"Still got the knife you held against my throat, asshole?" The voice coming out of me sounded guttural, primitive.

"No," he answered.

"You have a knife on you?"

"Yeah," he answered.

"Good," I said. "Try to hold it against my throat now, asshole."

He said nothing, but now he looked scared, good and scared.

"I'm sorry," he said, finally. His eyes were tearing up. He was slumped, defeated, looking like a whipped dog.

I looked at him for a moment, and something changed in me. Try as I might, I couldn't hold on to the rage I felt. It left my body like an outgoing tide.

"I can't believe I was ever afraid of a pussy like you," I said. He said nothing. He stood there, eyes downcast, looking nothing like the blond-haired boogeyman of my seventh grade year.

He graduated a month later, and I never saw him again. Not in person, anyway. But, ten years later, I would read about him in the newspaper.

He'd come out of a supermarket, where he came upon an elderly couple being accosted outside their car by a knife-welding transient. He grappled with the man while the old couple escaped back to the store. The store people called the police, but they arrived to find the transient gone, and the blond-haired boogeyman from my junior high on the pavement with multiple stab wounds.

He died in the ambulance. I wish he hadn't. I wish he would have lived, and I wish I would have known him as the man he became.

I would never have let him buy the beer. Heroes shouldn't have to buy their own beer.

Prompted by Thom G's Three Word Wednesday. Today's words are ideal, measure, and teeter.

Under the Bed

I woke to hear my wife groaning in pain. Her neck again. I got up to get the heating pad, stepping at least a foot from the bed frame. I've done that since I was five or so. If you step at least a foot from the edge of the bed, the thing under the bed can't grab you.

Don't laugh. Don't scoff. Don't sneer. Those things live under beds, and you know it. If you'll be honest with yourself, really honest with yourself, so honest that you're once again in touch with the child within, you'll admit that it's always in the back of your mind when you have to step out of bed during the middle of the night.

I got back in bed with my wife, and put the heating pad on her neck for a while. I started kneading her neck and upper back, but after a few minutes, I decided I needed a better position. I grabbed a chair and pulled it next to the bed. Preoccupied with my wife's discomfort, I stuck my feet under the box spring.

I'd been working on her neck for just a few minutes when I felt the dry tentacle wrap around my ankle. I tried to ignore it, but I couldn't, especially when I felt a nibble on my big toe.

"Honey, has it been a week?"

"Yeah, I think he's due to surface tonight."

Sometimes we didn't see him for eight or nine days at a stretch, but usually he emerged at weekly intervals. Thoughts of getting back to sleep went down the drain. I wondered if he just wanted to visit, or engage in one of his epic wrestling matches.

They can only come out from under the bed once a week, at most. I guess it's some kind of rule. I pushed the chair back and leaned to the floor. "C'mon, Barney."

He slithered up to the crook of my elbow, and I could tell that he wasn't in the mood to wrestle. I cradled him in my arms and placed him next to my wife. "Hi, Barney," she said, petting the blob that passed for his head. Barney looks a bit like an octopus, but not as pretty.

He purred a bed monster purr, and as I returned to tending to my wife's pains, she purred too.

Prompted by Thom G's Three Word Wednesday. Today's words are drain, epic, and nibble.

Stoplight

Julie died six days after her sixth birthday. She was an only child, the apple of his eye, and he had killed her.

They had been in the pool, and he remembered that he had forgotten the phone. He told her to stand in the shallow end: no swimming, no diving. "Okay Daddy," she'd said, with that sweet little sing-song voice.

He walked back to the pool with the phone and lemonade. He thought she was playing a joke on him at first, floating face down in the pool, but a heartbeat later, he knew it was no joke. He pulled her out, and felt tremendous relief when she started breathing again. She opened her eyes, looked into his, and said, "Daddy."

He picked her up, kissed her on the forehead.

"Daddy?"

She went limp, and he saw the light in her eyes dim. He watched life ebb away from his little girl, and the screaming and crying and pleading with God made no difference.

Cardiac arrest. A congenital heart defect. His mom had died of the same malady. But not at six.

Katie was shipwrecked, of course. And yet, she never blamed him, not even with her eyes. She tried to keep the bridge between them intact, but he'd driven her away, crippled by self-loathing.

**

He awoke in his dingy apartment in the bad part of San Diego, ambushed by a hangover, with an hideous taste in his mouth. The drive to the office seemed to take hours, and the sun drilled through his skull. He remembered little of the previous night's alcohol-fueled journey.

He pulled off the freeway onto the surface street. He stopped at the light, and noticed a commotion to his left, outside of a cafe.

He didn't remember stepping out of his car, or leaving it running at the stoplight, or walking to the scene. He only remembered a young woman on her knees, crying hysterically, and a man holding a handgun to a young girl's head. The girl looked like she could be six or so.

The scene was horrible enough, but he froze when he saw the little girl's face. She looked like a raven-haired, dark-eyed version of his Julie. His daughter. The daughter he'd killed.

He thought about running away, calling in sick, and holing up in a bar for the day. But he kept moving toward the man and the girl.

The man saw him from twenty feet, and leveled the pistol at him.

"Stop. Not another fuckin' step."
"I just want to talk to you."
"I don't want to talk to you."

He took three more steps. Again, the father moved the pistol from the girl's head and aimed it at his chest. The little girl was hyperventilating, squeaking Daddy please Daddy please Daddy please.

"DO YOU WANT TO DIE?"

He felt his body go rigid. Fear gripped him, and that struck him as strange. He laughed at something his dad had told him: Don't meddle in the affairs of others.

"You stupid bastard. You think this is funny?"
"Yeah, sort of."
"What's so fuckin' funny then?"
"Well, until you pointed that gun at me, I thought I wanted to die."

A siren in the distance. A pause. The father looked at him, his rage dimmed by bewilderment.

"Why do you want to die?"
"Because I killed my daughter."

The father seemed to deflate.

"What did you say?"
"I said that I killed my daughter."

Another pause.

"I left her alone in a swimming pool."

Another pause.

He said, "I could take your daughter's place, you know. You could use me as a hostage."

The father looked down at his little girl. His face softened.

"Come closer."

He did. The sirens were close.

The father bent down. "Go to your mama, honey."

The girl tumbled into her mother's arms.

The father looked at him. He placed the barrel of the pistol squarely in his chest.

"So, do you still want to die?"
"I guess I'm too much of a coward to want what I deserve."

The father pulled the pistol back. He looked at his daughter, and his wife at his knees. He turned the pistol around, with the barrel resting on his abdomen.

"DON'T," he cried.

The father didn't. Instead, he handed him the gun. He smiled. "I guess I'm a coward too."

**

A week later, on the last day of the year, he called Katie.

"I was wondering if I could take you to lunch," he said.
"Really?"
"Yeah, really."
"I'd like that," she said. "Or, you could come over and I could make you lunch."
"Really?"
"Yeah, really."

"I'd like that," he said.






Prompted by Thom G's Three Word Wednesday. The words are ambush, hideous, and meddle.

Bridge to Then, Bridge to Now

He woke up chuckling. It was a weekend morning, and he didn't want to wake up his wife, so he tried to quiet himself.

She uttered, "Hm?" and went back to sleep.

He rose from bed, and checked on his son. Both of the dogs slept beneath him, fulfilling their mission to keep watch over Their Boy.

He walked outside, shirtless, into the pre-dawn darkness, feeling the delicious hint of autumn in the night air.

It was a funny dream. It was a dream about another woman, one from his past. He'd known her since kindergarten, but they'd become lovers in their thirties, after the death of his dad. She'd offered a balm over his grief, and the frenzy of their lovemaking would eclipse his sorrow, a sorrow that would further languish in the tenderness of the after.

But it wasn't the way their bodies slid across each other, lubricated by sweat, that filled his dream. It wasn't the way she would breathe, or the sound of their loins colliding, or the expression on her face as she reached that special place, or the way he'd snake his arms beneath her and squeeze as his time came.

No, it was the after. In the dream, he was on top of her, spent, covered in sweat, his arms still between her back and the mattress. He was drifting off to sleep, wilting inside of her.

Her grunts of discomfort brought him to.

"Sorry," he said, and rolled to the mattress.
"It's okay," she said. "I like it until I can't breathe. And by the way, I was just faking the rest of it."
"Good," he answered. "Please continue."
They both chuckled.

In the dark, out in the driveway, the better part of two decades later, he chuckled again.

He thought of one of the hardest nights of his life. It was the night he told her of meeting the love of his life again. The look on her face just before she started crying had haunted him over the years. He'd harbored a childlike hope that they would end gently, but instead, the end came with a brutal velocity.

He stood in the dark, looking at the first hint of dawn over the ridge. He thought of other things too: meals they'd shared, places they'd been, gatherings with friends. He thought of how he'd heard from her for the first time in nearly sixteen years, and how she'd offered the gift of forgiveness.

"I don't hate you anymore," she'd written.

He stopped at the steps, a lump in his throat. He was grateful that he could think back to those times and smile without guilt hazing his memories. Now he could call her a friend again. Now, once more, she was in his present.

He smiled for the dawn, and for himself.

He walked back to the house, hoping his wife and son would wake soon. He was in the mood to take them to breakfast.




Prompted by Thom G's Three Word Wednesday of September 23, 2009. The words are eclipse, languish, and velocity.

His Daughter

I was way early for my flight, but I didn't feel like doing my typical pacing routine through the terminal in New Orleans. I sat down in the gate area, watching people gather for a flight leaving before mine.

A forty-something man walked up with his daughter. The girl looked to be my son's age, nine or so. She was blond, with striking, electric-blue eyes. The man was fit and rugged-looking, with olive skin and dark hair. After checking in with the gate agent, they returned to their standing position a few feet in front of me. They stood looking at the gate, his hands on her shoulders.

She turned and wrapped her arms around him.

"I don't want to leave, Daddy."

My mind raced to fill in the blanks. A divorce. Mom has custody. Daughter visiting Dad for the summer. School about to start. A flight back to Mom and her other life.

"I know Honey. But I'll see you during Christmas break, okay?" His voice sounded just a little . . . governed.

"But that's so long from now, Daddy. I wish I could live with you all the time."

The dad looked at a loss, as if the right words were failing him.

Finally, he said, "Me too, Honey."

The gate agent came to them, told them that the girl could board early. He walked with her to the ramp entrance. She threw her arms around him one last time, and I saw them both mouth the words, "I love you." She walked down the ramp, and he watched her leaving until there was nothing more to watch. He walked the few steps back to my vicinity, and turned to look at the airplane. Tears rolled from his eyes. I decided to give him his space, and stood to go buy a magazine.

I paused. I clapped him lightly on the shoulder, surprising him.

"Hang in there," I said.
"Thanks."
"She's going back to Mom for the school year?"
"Yeah. Damn this is tough."
"How long have you and Mom been divorced?"
"Two years. A long two years."
"Gosh I'm sorry," I said. "I can't imagine how hard it must be to see her go."
"She's not mine, but she's in my heart, you know?"
I paused. "You're her stepdad, then?"

It was his turn to pause. He looked at me pointedly, and seemed to weigh something in his mind. "I had a DNA test done when she was five. Turned out I wasn't the biological father. I told my wife and my girl that I was going on a fishing trip for a few days, but I checked into a hotel and drank myself stupid."

"My God," was all I could say.

"At first, I made plans to divorce my wife. I was going to get transferred out of down; I was going to start a new life. But after four days holed up in that hotel, I knew that I loved that little girl more than ever. Some other guy's seed may have created her, but she was my daughter."

I started to speak, but I had to get past the lump in my throat.

"Did you ever confront your wife?"
"No. I was afraid she would leave with my daughter." He laughed a curt, bitter laugh. "Two years later, she left anyway."
"Will you ever tell your daughter?"
"If she ever thinks to ask, I won't lie to her. But no, otherwise, I'll carry the truth to my grave."

He drew into himself for a moment. Then he surfaced, and stuck out his hand.

"Thanks for talking with me friend; it was mighty kind of you." He chuckled. "Hell, I haven't told anyone about my daughter, and I end up spilling my guts to a stranger at the airport."
I smiled. "Hell man, I'm just a nosy bastard."
He laughed. "I think I needed to run into a nosy bastard this morning." He looked at his watch. "Time to get to the office. Thanks again, friend."

He reached for his wallet, probably to give me one of his business cards. But he seemed to reconsider, and he walked away.

I watched him leaving until there was nothing more to watch.