When the Sky Fell on Splendor(28)
She’d been pining for grad school and a NASA job when Mark came along, and so had settled for community college and a research-and-development job at a shampoo factory, and when she told us the story, she made it sound like the world’s best trade-off.
But maybe it hadn’t been. Maybe she thought that if Mark got to follow his dreams, it would make up for the ones she’d given up.
“Think about it, Robert,” she’d begged Dad. “This is his destiny. He’s already missed out on the camps and the boarding schools and the private lessons. We can at least support him now. We can give him time to focus, to catch up.”
“Art school’s expensive, Eileen. How’s he going to make that dream a reality if he’s not willing to do the work?”
Dad knew some guys at the steel mill. Everyone knew some guys at the steel mill. It was almost singlehandedly propping up the Splendor economy.
“Full-time,” Dad had said.
“Part-time,” Mom had argued.
Mark had stood right there, but he hadn’t said anything, just let them wear themselves out. He hated being in the middle of disagreements. Whenever Arthur wouldn’t give me a turn at Mario Kart, Mark would just hand his controller over to me and leave the room, much to Arthur’s chagrin.
When I was angry, I buried it deep. When Arthur was angry, he’d let it snap out of him like a bear trap. But when Mark was angry, he closed his eyes and thought through it.
While Arthur and I were listening in to Mom and Dad’s argument from the staircase, we could see Mark doing just that.
Finally, he opened his eyes and said, “It could be cool. Working at the mill could be cool. It’s good pay, and I bet they’d let me take some scrap metal home.”
Dad had stared back at him, not understanding what could be cool about taking home scrap metal.
“For sculptures,” Mark had explained.
Mom’s wide eyes had gone even wider, mirroring Mark’s curiosity right back at him. She turned it over. She nodded. “I suppose so.”
By then Mark was distracted, staring out the window at something we couldn’t see.
He always saw things that Arthur and I didn’t. Around that time, he’d been obsessed with Fibonacci spirals, a mathematical concept he’d tried to explain to me for easily two hours.
I was more for climbing trees and tromping through creek beds than studying either one through a microscope and then turning them into paintings, but I loved the way he’d explain something over and over again without any sign of impatience, and I loved watching him look out the window and wondering what magical thing he saw.
Two days after his conversation with Mom and Dad, he’d started the job.
And for nearly a year, life went on pretty much how it always had.
We ate breakfast around the table in the kitchen. We fought over controllers and fell asleep on the floor watching movies with Mom and Dad. Talked about our Halloween costumes too early, and went to church on Easter, and chased Droog around the yard. Looked through Mom’s telescope while she explained the Milky Way and the Zeta Reticuli and spiral galaxies, which were, Mark informed us, Fibonacci spirals. Gave up on the exorbitant Halloween costumes and trick-or-treated as ghosts instead, though even I was really too old for it.
And most days Mark came home from work tired and too dirty for his taste; Arthur and I came home from school tired and too clean for ours. We spent our weekends stomping through woods and picking ticks off our scalps while he spent his with sketches and blueprints spread across the table, planning what he’d build when his co-worker finished teaching him to weld. Mom and Dad laughed in the kitchen. We argued. We kicked each other. Arthur spat on my face. Droog knocked things off the coffee table and Mom groaned and told her she was a very bad girl, and Mark scratched behind her ears and whispered, It’s okay, Droopy-Baby. We all mess up. And Mom kissed us good night, and said I love you from the hallway just before she turned off the light, and Dad badly sang a few bars of Carole King’s “Way Over Yonder.”
And if I’d thought about it in those months, I would’ve guessed life would always go on this way.
You’re born. You sing. You die.
Instead, Mom showed up at the school one day in May.
“Was anyone else hurt?” I asked her from the back seat of the Voyager.
She chewed on her thumbnail as she drove. “That’s all I know.”
* * *
*
My phone kept freezing and glitching and once even shut itself off, but finally, I made it to TheFallingSkyIncident’s page.
Only, when I navigated to the video, a notice popped up: a gradient screen with a red frowny face and the message “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim.”
I checked the URL again, but this was the right link.
How could the video be copyrighted? Levi had taken it two nights ago.
The top comment was still I want to believe, but right beneath that, the second highest-voted read, hey DICKWEEDS the videos gone.
Painstakingly, I scrolled through the glitching column of comments. People who were excited, people who’d linked to their Tumblr posts “proving this is completely edited garbage.” Apparently it had something to do with our shadows being incorrectly cast.
I went farther back, scouring for CitizenOfTheBlackMailbox’s comment. Within an hour, I’d reached the beginning without finding it. I started scrolling back the other direction, taking my time.