The Calculating Stars (Lady Astronaut, #1)(18)

Under all of that grime, the old man was wearing a tweed jacket, complete with bona fide leather patches at the elbows. “Where did you teach?”

“The Citadel.”

“Charleston?” My voice was too loud. People had turned to stare. I swallowed and tried again. “You were in Charleston?”

The old man lowered his head a little and studied me out of his good eye. “You got people there?”

“Hometown.”

“I’m sorry…” He shook his head. “I was out on a hike with cadets. Way inland. When we got back … well. I’m real sorry.”

I nodded, clenching my jaw against the truth of what I already knew. The blast radius of the meteorite, followed by the tidal waves, meant there’d been little chance. But if I didn’t know, then I could still hope. And hope would kill me.

*

It took walking up the stairs of the synagogue to realize that entering that door meant admitting that my family was dead.

The thought stopped me on the stairs, and I gripped the dusty metal railing. My family was dead. I had come to the synagogue because I needed to begin the mourning rites.

Daddy was never going to pick up his trumpet again. Mama’s giant cross-stitched bedspread would never be finished, and was so much ash.

My eyes closed of their own volition, blocking out the brick exterior and the scrubby little yew trees that flanked the stairs. Beneath the dark shield of my lids, my eyes burned. The grit under my hands was the same ash that drifted through most of the town. Ejecta from D.C.

“Are you all right?” An older man’s voice, with a hint of German to it, came from slightly behind me.

I opened my eyes and turned with a smile, even though my eyes must be red. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to block the way.”

The man, who stood a step down, was not older than I was, or if he was, it wasn’t by much. His face, though, had a remnant of gauntness to it that I recognized. A Holocaust survivor.

“You … had family?”

God. Spare me from the kindness of strangers. I stared at the horizon, an amber haze over the Ohio plains. “Yes. So—I need to go in to talk to the rabbi.”

He nodded and slipped past me to hold the door. “I, myself, am here for the same reason.”

“Oh—oh. I am so sorry.” I was such a self-centered schlub. I was hardly the only one with Jewish family in Charleston. And the damage to New York sounded extensive, and then D.C., and … How many of us had died leaving no one behind to light the yahrzeit candles and recite the Kaddish prayer?

His shrug was small and sad as he gestured me through the door. I stepped into the foyer. Through the open doors I could just make out the comforting light of the eternal flame hanging in front of the ark as a reminder.

This man … he must have escaped Germany, only to have this happen when he thought he was safe. And yet, he had survived. As had I.

That’s what we did. We survived.

And we remembered.

*

It is hard to sit shiva in a gentile’s home. I compromised with myself and called our bedroom “home” because I did not feel up to explaining to Mrs. Lindholm why I wanted to sit on low stools, or cover the mirrors.

Nathaniel walked in to find me sitting on the floor of our bedroom, pinning a torn ribbon to my shirt. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to tear the shirt itself, not because the grief wasn’t there, but to avoid the conversation about why I’d torn something we had just bought.

He stopped, and his gaze went to the jagged tear in the ribbon. His shoulders sagged, as if the fact that I had performed kriah alone let all the grief back in.

My husband came over to sit on the floor beside me, pulling me into an embrace. The custom against speaking to someone in mourning until they spoke first had never made so much sense. I could not have spoken if I had tried. And, I suspect, neither could he.

*

When the week of shiva passed, I called every mechanic in the phone book. None of them had the parts or time to repair my plane. But I had to do something.

I had survived, and there must be some reason for that. Some purpose or meaning or … something. I took to going to the hospital with Mrs. Lindholm every day to roll bandages, clean bed pans, and serve soup to plane after plane after plane of refugees.

They kept coming. I called the mechanics again. And then again.

One of them made vague promises about maybe looking into ordering a propeller, if he had time. If Nathaniel were home during the day, I would have asked him to make the call for me.

But each night he came home even later than I did. Friday night, two weeks after the Meteor, he came home well after sundown. Mind you, we had never been terribly religious about keeping the Sabbath before the meteorite, but somehow after it … I needed something. Some continuity.

I met Nathaniel at the door and took his coat from him. Major Lindholm—Eugene—and Myrtle had gone to a prayer meeting at their church, so we had the house to ourselves. “You aren’t supposed to work after sundown.”

“I’m a terrible Jew.” He leaned down to kiss me. “But I was occupied with convincing generals that no, the Russians could not have dropped the Meteor on us.”

“Still?” I hung his coat on a peg by the door.

“The problem is that Parker had mentioned it to … someone … probably several someones … and now it’s spread through the military as, ‘I heard there was a possibility that this was an offensive action by the Russians. ’”