Can you get them just this once? I was going to see a movie with Cass.” “Well, I don’t know when I can leave work.” “Harley’s out of town.” As I told you last week, she almost added, but decided not to. “Can’t Harley do it?” Harley, the dog-sitter. “Can you pick up the dogs from day care tomorrow?” Terumi asked one evening, months before Anna’s mission started.Īnna was scrubbing out the stock pot. “You heard it too,” she says, scratching his head, although she’s not sure she believes it. She scratches behind his ears and kisses his nose. Let’s stop.”īaxter sighs gently, reminding her that he needs to be petted. Anna deflected arguments by pointing it out: “We’re scaring Baxter, baby. When she and Anna used to fight, he’d hide in his kennel, cowering from their raised voices. The words bounce around in the house aimlessly.īaxter pads up and scrambles into her lap.
Loves them? “Happy anniversary,” she says. She doesn’t care for tulips but Anna loved them. The tulips she’d bought yesterday nodded at her. Terumi sits at the kitchen table the morning after she heard Anna’s voice the first time. The dogs’ tongues were lolling with exhaustion when they finally came home.
She hung up and took the dogs out for a walk that lasted three hours. She said, “Thank you.” She listened to the expressions of grief. Terumi didn’t say, you knew for seventy-two hours and you didn’t tell me? “The team’s done what they can, but they can’t expend the resources to keep searching. The vehicle was found empty, her tracker stopped transmitting. “She left the habitat on a routine patrol. Terumi’s voice was lost inside the hollowness of her chest. The team lost contact with her seventy-two hours ago.” In Terumi’s case, the director herself broke the news. Everyone knows someone who’s had the call. There’s an informal confederacy among those who are left behind. The call came eight months ago, the one all astronauts’ spouses dread. She strokes his silky ears as he snores against her belly. Ringo lies at her feet, and Baxter jumps into her lap. She pulls a chair to the window, wraps herself in a blanket, and gazes out into the starless night. She lights the candles and a stick of incense and stares at the photo of Anna. The dogs fling themselves into the front yard. “Is it really you?” She opens the front door. “Anna?” Terumi follows the dogs downstairs, where they race from room to room, searching for their human. “It’s the weirdest thing, I-” The rest of the sentence fades into silence. “T, you can hear me, right?” Anna’s voice is still clear, but fading now, like the volume on a headset being turned down. Her late wife’s photo smiles at her from the dresser, framed by two unlit candles. But this is impossible, she thinks, it must be a dream. The old basset hound Ringo pushes the bedroom door open with his nose. It is our anniversary, right?”īaxter the terrier, nestled against her legs, jerks to alertness. Anna? Terumi reaches across the empty bed seeking Anna’s warm presence.
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