“Just calm down,” I said. “Okay, Mom?”
Finally, the phone did ring. My mother answered it in a rush. I could tell she was disappointed by the voice she was hearing. She passed the phone to me.
It wasn’t my father. It was Hanna.
I stood up from the porch and walked out into the grass with the phone to my ear, squinting at the sun.
“I can’t really talk,” said Hanna. “But I wanted to tell you that we’re leaving.”
I could hear the voices of Hanna’s sisters echoing in the background. I could picture her standing in the bedroom she shared with them, the yellow-striped curtains her mother had sewn, the stuffed animals crowded on her bed, the hair clips spread out across the dresser. We had spent hours together in that room.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Utah,” Hanna said. She sounded scared.
“When are you coming back?” I asked.
“We’re not,” she said.
I felt a wave of panic. We’d spent so much time together that year that teachers sometimes called us by one another’s names.
As I would later learn, thousands of Mormons gathered in Salt Lake City after the slowing began. Hanna had told me once that the church had pinpointed a certain square mile in Utah as the exact location of Jesus’ next return to earth. They kept a giant grain silo out there, she said, to feed the Mormons during the end times. “I’m not supposed to tell you this stuff because you’re not in our church,” she said. “But it’s true.”
My own family’s religion was a bloodless breed of Lutheranism— we guarded no secrets, and we harbored no clear vision of the end of the world.
“Are you still there?” said Hanna.
It was hard to talk. I stood in the grass, trying not to cry.
“You’re moving away for good?” I finally said.
I heard Hanna’s mother call her name in the background.
“I have to go,” Hanna said. “I’ll call you later.”
She hung up.
“What did she say?” called my mother from the porch.
A hard lump had formed in my throat.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Nothing?” said my mother.
Tears began to fill my eyes. My mother didn’t notice.
“I want to know why Daddy hasn’t called us,” she said. “Do you think his phone is dead?”
“God, Mom,” I said. “You’re making everything worse.”
She stopped talking and looked at me. “Don’t be a smart-aleck,” she snapped. “And don’t say God.”
A slight static crackled through the radio speakers, and my mother adjusted the dial until it cleared. An expert from Harvard was talking: “If this keeps up,” he said, “this could be catastrophic for crops of all kinds, for the whole world’s food supply.”
We sat in silence for a moment.
Then from inside the house, we heard a quick thud, the wet smack of something soft striking glass.
We both jumped.
“What was that?” she said.
The unimaginable had been imagined, the unbelievable believed. Now it seemed to me that dangers lurked everywhere. Threats seemed to hide in every crack.
“It didn’t sound good,” I said.
We hurried inside. We hadn’t put anything away, and the kitchen was a mess. My bagel from the morning lay half eaten on a plate, exactly where I’d left it eight hours earlier, the cream cheese crusting at the edges. A container of yogurt had been overturned by the cats, its insides licked clean. Someone had left out the milk. I noticed that Hanna had left her soccer sweatshirt on a chair.
The source of the sound turned out to be a bird. A blue jay had struck a high window in our kitchen, then dropped to the back deck, its narrow neck apparently snapped, its wings spread asymmetrically around its body.
“Maybe it’s just stunned,” said my mother.
We stood at the glass.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
The slowing, we soon came to understand, had altered gravity. Afterward, the earth held a little more sway. Bodies in motion were slightly less likely to remain in motion. We were all of us and everything a little more susceptible to the pull of the ground, and maybe it was this shift In physics that had sent that bird straight into the flat glass of our windowpane.
“Maybe we should move it,” I said.
“I don’t want you touching it,” said my mother. “Daddy will deal with it.”
And so we left the bird exactly as it lay. We kept the cats inside for the rest of the night.
We left the kitchen as we’d found it, too. We’d remodeled it recently, and you could smell the paint in the air, but that chemical scent was mixing with the tinge of soured milk. My mother poured a fresh drink: Two new ice cubes cracked and resettled beneath a stream of sparkling Scotch. I’d never seen her drink so much in one day.
She headed back out to the front porch. “Come on,” she said.
But I was tired of being with her. I went up to my room instead and lay flat on my bed for a while.
Twenty minutes later, the sun finally did slip behind the hill, proof at last that the earth, however slowly, continued to turn.
The wind reversed in the night and turned hard, blowing in from the desert instead of up from the sea. It howled and shrieked. Outside, the eucalyptus trees struggled and heaved, and the glittering stars showed that the sky was clear of clouds—this was an empty, stormless wind.
At some point, I heard the creaking of cabinets in the kitchen, the soft squeak of hinges. I recognized the shuffling of my mother’s slippered feet, the uncapping of a pill bottle, and a glass of water slowly filling at the sink.
I wished my father were home. I tried to picture him at the hospital. Maybe babies were being born into his hands right at that moment. I wondered what it might mean to come into the world on this of all nights.
Soon the streetlights flashed off, sucking the low glow from my room. This should have marked dawn, but the neighborhood remained submerged in the dark. It was a new kind of darkness for me, a thick country black, unseen in cities and suburbs.
I left my room and crept into the hall. Through the crack beneath my parents’ door, I could see the sickly blue light of the television leaking onto the hall carpet.
“You’re not sleeping, either?” said my mother when I opened the door. She looked slouchy and worn in an old white nightgown. Bouquets of fine wrinkles fanned out from her eyes.
I climbed into bed beside her. “What’s all that wind?” I asked.
We spoke in low tones as if someone were sleeping nearby. The television was on mute.
“It’s just a Santa Ana,” she said, rubbing my back with the palm of her hand. “It’s Santa Ana season. It’s always like this in the fall, remember? That part, at least, is normal.”
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Seven-forty-five.”
“It should be morning,” I said.
“It is,” she said. The sky remained dark. There was no hint of dawn.
We could hear the cats, restless in the garage. I could hear a scratching at the door and Tony’s persistent, uncertain wailing. He was nearly blind from cataracts, but I could tell that even he knew something was wrong.
“Did Daddy call?” I asked.
My mother nodded. “He’s going to work another shift because not everyone showed up.”
We sat for a long time in silence while the wind blew around us. The light from the television flashed on the white walls.
“When he gets home, let him rest, okay?” said my mother. “He’s had a very rough night.”
“What happened?”
She bit her lip and kept her eyes on the television.
“A woman died,” she said.
“Died?”
I’d never heard of such a thing happening under my father’s care. To die in childbirth seemed to me a frontier woman’s death, as impossible now as polio or the plague, made extinct by o
ur ingenious monitors and machines, our clean hands and strong soaps, our drugs and our cures and our vast stores of knowledge.
“Daddy feels it never would have happened if they were working with a full staff. They were stretched too thin.”
“What about the baby?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. There were tears in her eyes.
For some reason, it was right then and not earlier that I really began to worry. I rolled over in my parents’ bed, and the scent of my father’s earthy cologne wafted up from the sheets. I wanted him home.
On the television screen, a reporter was standing in a desert somewhere, the sky pinkening behind her. They were charting the sunrise as they would a storm—the sun had reached the eastern edge of Nevada, but there was no sign of it yet in California.
Later, I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.
4
At last, like a fever, the night broke. Sunday morning: The sky glowed a delicate blue.
Our backyard was littered in pine needles from the wind. A pair of potted marigolds lay overturned on the patio, the soil spilling from the pots. The umbrella and the lawn chairs had been strewn around the deck. Our eucalyptus trees stood listing and windblown. The dead blue jay remained unchanged.
In the distance, a wisp of smoke was puffing up from the horizon, floating quickly westward with the wind. I remembered then that this was fire season, too.
A news helicopter circled the plume like a fly. It was reassuring to know that at least one crew had been assigned to cover this most ordinary of disasters.
After breakfast, I tried Hanna’s cell phone, but it just rang and rang. I knew it was different for her: Hanna’s life was noisy with sisters, her house a maze of bunk beds and shared sinks where the washing machine ran perpetually just to keep up with the dresses that piled each night in the laundry basket. It took two station wagons to carry her family away.
In my house, I could hear the floors creak.
By the time my father came home from the hospital in the late afternoon, the winds had calmed, and a low fog was rolling in from the coast, obscuring the slow motion of our sun across the sky.
“Had my headlights on the whole way home,” said my father. “Couldn’t see five feet in front of me in that fog.”
He looked exhausted, but it was a relief to see him standing in our kitchen.
He ate half a sandwich standing up. Then he cleared the counters of the dishes we’d left out the day before and wiped everything down with a sponge. He watered my mother’s orchids, and then he stood at the sink, washing his hands for a long time.
“You should get some sleep,” said my mother. She was wrapped in the same gray sweater she’d worn the day before.
“I’m too wired,” he said.
“You should lie down, at least.”
He looked out the window and surveyed the back deck. He pointed at the dead bird. “When did that happen?”
“Last night,” I said.
He nodded and slid open the drawer, where he kept a supply of surgical gloves for use in household jobs. I followed him outside.
“It’s a shame,” he said, crouching low near the bird.
A troupe of ants had discovered the body and were marching back and forth from the edge of the deck, descending deep into the feathers, and emerging with tiny bits of the bird on their backs.
My father flapped a white trash bag in the air until it snapped open and inflated.
“Maybe it’s because gravity changed,” I said.
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “Birds have always had trouble with our windows. Their eyesight isn’t very good.”
He stretched a surgical glove over each of his hands. A wave of rubbery dust floated off the wrist cuffs. I could smell the latex where I stood.
He closed one gloved palm over the bird’s rib cage, the wings sagging like tree branches as he lifted it into the air. Two black eyes the size of peppercorns remained motionless in its head. A few lost ants ran in frantic circles across my father’s wrist.
“Sorry about what happened at work,” I said.
“What do you mean?” said my father. He let the bird slip from his hand and into the bag. The sound was wet and echoey against the plastic. He blew on his wrist to get rid of the ants.
“A woman died, right?” I said.
“What?”
He looked at me, surprised. I understood then that it was a mistake to mention it.
My father was quiet. I could feel my cheeks turning hot and red. He used two fingers like tweezers to pick up the last stray feather from the deck and drop it into the sack. Then he rubbed his forehead with the back of one bent wrist.
“No, sweetheart,” he said. “No one died.”
This was the first lie I ever heard my father tell—or the first time I knew that he was lying. But it would not be the last. And not the boldest, either.
On the deck where the bird had lain, a hundred ants ran in circles, in search of their lost feast.
My father pulled the trash bag’s drawstring shut and tied it firmly at the top.
“You and your mom worry too much as it is,” he said. “I told you two that nothing would happen overnight, and see? Nothing did.”
We took the bag to the garbage cans on the other side of the house. The bird’s dark silhouette showed through the white plastic as we walked, the body folding in on itself as the bag swung in time to my father’s quick paces.
He pulled the hose out to the deck and washed away the ants and the blood, but a spot of grease would remain on the window for weeks, like skid marks after a car accident.
Finally, he went upstairs to sleep, and my mother went with him.
I sat alone in the living room for a long time, watching television, while my parents murmured together through the closed door of their bedroom. I heard my mother ask a question. My father raised his voice: “What is that supposed to mean?”
I turned the television down and strained to hear the rest.
“Of course I was at work,” he said. “Where the hell else would I be?”
We were living under a new gravity, too subtle for our minds to register, but our bodies were already subject to its sway. In the weeks that followed, as the days continued to expand, quarterbacks found that footballs didn’t fly as far as they used to; home-run hitters slipped into slumps. I would find it harder and harder to kick a soccer ball across a field. Pilots would have to retrain themselves to fly. Every falling thing fell faster to the ground.
It seems to me now that the slowing triggered certain other changes too, less visible at first but deeper. It disrupted certain subtler trajectories: the tracks of friendships, for example, the paths toward and away from love. But who am I to say that the course of my childhood was not already set long before the slowing? Perhaps my adolescence was only an average adolescence, the stinging a quite unremarkable stinging. There is such a thing as coincidence: the alignment of two or more seemingly related events with no causal connection. Maybe everything that happened to me and to my family had nothing at all to do with the slowing. It’s possible, I guess. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much.
5
Two days passed. More new minutes were flooding in with every hour. Now it was Monday. There was no new news.
I’d been hoping that school would be canceled—all the kids were. Instead, school was simply delayed. A hasty plan had been devised to push back our start time by ninety minutes, roughly the amount by which we were running behind.
We’d been asked by the government to carry on as usual. This was not true later, obviously, but for now our leaders stood before microphones, dressed in dark suits and red ties, Am
erican-flag pins glinting from navy blue lapels. Mostly, they talked economics: Go to work, spend money, leave your cash in the banks.
“They’re definitely not telling us everything,” said Trevor Watkins at the bus stop that Monday morning. More than half the kids who usually waited there had stayed home or left town with their families.
I missed Hanna like a phantom limb.
“It’s just like Area 51,” said Trevor, chewing the frayed black straps of his backpack. “They never tell the public the truth.”
Our lives were mild back then. We were girls in sandals and sundresses, boys in board shorts and surf shirts. We were growing up in a retiree’s dream—330 days of sunshine each year—and so we celebrated whenever it rained. Catastrophe, too, like bad weather, was provoking in all of us an uneasy excitement and verve.
From the other side of the lot came the echo of a skateboard striking the curb. I knew who it was without looking, but I wanted to look: Seth Moreno—tall and quiet and always on his own, now stepping carefully off of his skateboard and into the dirt, his dark hair falling into his eyes as he moved. I had never spoken much to Seth Moreno, though I sat behind him in math. I had perfected a way of watching him that didn’t look like I was watching.
“Trust me,” Trevor went on. He was skinny and friendless, and his enormous green backpack was so heavy that it forced him to hunch forward, like an old man, for balance. “The government knows a lot more than they’re saying.”
“Shut up,” said Daryl. Daryl was the new kid, the bad kid, the kid who left fourth period every day to go to the nurse’s office to swallow a dose of Ritalin. He was the kid we all tried to avoid. “No one’s listening to you, Trevor.”
The bus stop was the hard ground where our school days always began, where insults were slung and secrets spilled or spread. We were standing where we always stood, in the same patch of dirt beside the same empty lot, the morning sun slanting at roughly the same slant. Our watches were useless, but the light felt right.