Life on Mars by Jennifer Brown
For a second, I feared I might have actually dreamed the whole thing and Cash Maddux didn’t really live here. Which would have been both the best and worst dream ever.
“Hi,” I said. “Is Cash home? Er … Mr. Maddux? Is he … here?”
She smiled down at me, one of those smiles my mom sometimes gives before she says something like, Well, aren’t you precious, or Bless your heart. She shook her head. “I’m sorry. He’s not.”
“Oh. Okay,” I said. “Can you tell him Arty came by?”
“Oh. You’re Arty? The boy he’s been stargazing with? He told me all about you.” I nodded, and a little jolt of happy wound its way through me at the thought of Cash telling someone about me. But also a little jolt of disappointment at the word “stargazing.” We weren’t “stargazing,” we were changing the course of humanity through scientific discovery!
“Please, come in.” She stepped aside and let me through the door. Once I was inside, she shut the door, then sat on the edge of the couch and resumed her saintly smile. “I’m Cash’s sister,” she said. “You can call me Sarah.”
“Okay,” I said, still standing awkwardly in the doorway, afraid to sit on anything now that I’d seen it in full light. Cash’s house was … ugly.
“Honey, I’m afraid Cash is in the hospital.”
“What? Why?”
She looked at me sympathetically. “He isn’t doing very well.”
I felt myself go numb from the chin down. “How not very well is he doing?” I asked.
She shook her head sadly, tilted to the side. You know the news is never going to be very good when it’s coming to you from a sideways head. “Did Cash ever tell you about his cancer?” she asked in a small voice.
And then I did sit down, but not by choice. My legs and butt pretty much made the decision for me, plopping me right down onto Cash’s recliner. “He has cancer?” I asked.
“Lung cancer. He’s had it for some time,” she said. “And I’m afraid it’s finally caught up with him.”
I said nothing. What did that mean, finally caught up with him? She’d made it sound like a monster, rushing through the woods after him, leaping forward and snagging him by the ankles, making him fall into the leaves.
Immediately I thought about our last few walks back from Huey, how Cash had coughed and gasped and how he’d had to stop and put his hands on his knees a few times.
Maybe my vision of the cancer monster wasn’t too far off.
“When will he get out?” I asked.
She did that sad head shake thing again, and I almost told her not to answer me at all, if her answer was going to begin with that shake or come out sideways. “I’m—I’m not sure …”
Suddenly it didn’t matter that we were moving to Vegas. It didn’t matter that the Bacteria ate all our food and talked only in single syllables. It didn’t matter that the Brielle Brigade couldn’t spell the word “science” or that I’d never climb into the tire rocket ship anymore or that I was walking around in a shoe that had once lived in Comet’s stomach for a whole day.
All that mattered was that my friend was dying.
“Can I go see him?” I asked.
Sarah gazed at me for a long moment, squeezing the towel in her fist. Open, close, open, close. She stood and placed the towel on the couch where she’d just been sitting.
“Let’s go ask your parents, and I’ll get my car keys,” she said.
29
A Comet’s Tail (Not the Dog’s, But Just as Smelly)
The hospital was white. White, white, white, everywhere I looked. White like the moon. White like the tail of a comet, the white of a meteor exploding under atmospheric pressure. Blindingly white.
Cash must have hated it there.
A nurse was standing by his bed, tapping something into a little electronic device that she slipped into her pocket when we came in. She squished an IV bag around and adjusted a blanket under his chin, smiling at us the whole time.
“He’s been resting comfortably,” she whispered to Sarah on her way out, and Sarah nodded gratefully.
I stood in the doorway, trying to take it all in. The beeping machines and the hiss of something squeezing and releasing. The tubes and the wires.
And the tiny, white-haired old man resting in the bed, his head smashed flat against the pillow, his eyes closed, his lips pale. One socked foot poked out from under the blanket, but otherwise, he was covered from chin to toe, like a mummy. Like somebody who was already dead.
He didn’t even look like Cash. His skin was too thin, almost see-through, his breathing too labored and false, as if he were a machine man rather than a real human. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the breathing sound to be inside the helmet in his space room instead.
The force is strong with this one (one-one).
I waited for my brain to take over, to hear mission control telling Cash and me it was time to take off, to hear us checking and ticking off the systems and buttons in our space shuttle one by one. I tried to imagine us floating around in the space station. Anything.
But nothing would come. All I could see was the whiteness of his skin. The brightness of that dying star of a hospital room.
“It’s too bright in here,” I said, and was surprised to hear my own voice sounding gruff, like Cash’s. I walked over to the one window and yanked the curtains shut. Immediately the room dimmed. Better.
Cash’s eyes opened at the scrrr sound of the curtains closing.
“Kid,” he said. Groggy. Breathless.
I froze. “Hi,” I said. I even gave a halfhearted wave, and then felt like a big dork about it.
“He came by. He wanted to see you,” Sarah offered. She took a few tentative steps toward her brother’s bed but seemed half-afraid. “How are you feeling?”
He turned his head to look at her. A scowl creased his face. “How do you think I feel? Like running a marathon? I feel like I’m dying.”
She took a step back and turned her face to the floor. I thought I saw a tear gather on the tip of her nose, but she kept her hands clasped together in the folds of her skirt.
Slowly, Cash snaked a hand out from under his blanket. He motioned for me to come closer. I did.
“Listen, kid,” he started, but then for a long time he didn’t say anything else and it felt really awkward, so I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the paper with the Morse code songs on it.
“I’ve got a new message to send,” I said hopefully. “When you get out, we can send it up. I think we’re getting close.”
He shook his head impatiently. “Not gonna happen,” he said.
“Sure it is,” I said. “We’ve worked so hard, and I think Huey is really good—the best I’ve ever had, actually—and …”
He swiped at the paper in my hand. It tore on one edge and floated down to my feet. “I said it’s not gonna happen,” he said, his voice guttural and raspy, and began a coughing fit like none I’d ever heard out of him before. Now that I had a name for that coughing—cancer—it frightened me. “We’re not gonna make contact with Mars,” he finally said once he’d caught his breath again.
“I’ll wait until you’re better,” I said weakly, and it wasn’t until a tear gathered on the tip of my own nose that I realized I had been crying. “We’ll do it together.”
“Kid, listen to me,” he said. “I’ve devoted my whole life to the sky. My whole life. It cost me marriage, kids, pets, everything. I had nothing but what was up there.” He jabbed a weak finger toward the ceiling. “I spent every waking second studying what’s up there. I used up everything I’ve got on what’s up there. And you know what’s up there?”
I shook my head, sniffed, did the hiccup-cry thing that babies and annoying little kids do.
“NOTHING!” he boomed, so loud both Sarah and I jumped and a nurse poked her head through the door curiously. He coughed for a moment, the end sounding weedy and agonizing, like words spilling out of his mouth rather than just air. “Nothing,” he rep
He turned his head so his watery eyes were gazing right into my watery eyes, and for a second I thought maybe I saw something in them that I recognized. Something I’d seen in Mom’s eyes when she yelled at me to look both ways, or in Dad’s eyes when he’d told us about Las Vegas. It was like a mixture of fear and protection. And maybe … worry?
“That project we’ve been working on? That contraption with the mirrors? It’s all yours, kid,” he continued. “But do us both a favor. Take it up to the hill and destroy it. Smash it to bits. It’ll be just as useful destroyed as it is now. Destroy it and walk away and live your life.”
I shook my head. “I can’t …”
“You hear me, Arty?” Cash said. I bit my lip. This was the first time Cash had ever called me by my real name. “Give up on it while you still have a life. Stop wasting it on a pipe dream. You are never going to contact anyone on Mars or any other planet. You aren’t going to prove that there’s life out there. You aren’t going to do anything that will make any difference as long as you’re looking at life through a telescope. Give up. Before you turn into a pathetic, lonely old man dying alone on a plastic-covered mattress.”
He coughed again, loud and long—so long I worried he might never stop.
“You’re not alone,” Sarah said softly. “We’re here.”
But I didn’t want to be there anymore. I was crying like an idiot, and my insides felt hard and burned from his words. Give up? Just give up on everything I’d ever believed in? He was the first person who’d ever believed with me, the first person to ever understand why the sky was so important to me. And now he was telling me to just give up?
Worse, he was telling me to give up because … it was useless.
“Go,” he said, and when Sarah and I didn’t move, he barked it out again painfully. “Go! You’re always hanging around where you’re not wanted, kid! I didn’t ask for you to come to my house. I didn’t ask for you to break into my space room. I didn’t ask for any of it.”
Sarah and I locked eyes, with a should we go? type of look, and he coughed twice, winced like he was in great pain, and bellowed, “Get out of here, I said! Let an old man die in peace! Don’t you have the sense to know when you’re not wanted?”
My face burned with anger and confusion. It wasn’t fair what he was doing. I came here because I … because I loved him. And he was smashing my dreams to bits. “You don’t have any sense!” I yelled back, before my brain could catch up with my mouth. “You know that? You’re the one with no sense! You have cancer and you keep smoking those nasty things and you don’t even care that you’re going to die and … and leave people behind!”
I bent to pick up the paper he’d knocked out of my hand. A whole night’s worth of work, something I’d been so hopeful about just a few minutes before, now just felt like trash. I leaned over and dropped it into the wastebasket, then hurried to Sarah’s side as she made for the door.
“Arty,” Cash said. But I just kept walking.
30
Huey and the Great Space Explosion
Sarah didn’t say much of anything as she drove me home from the hospital, other than that her brother wasn’t himself right now and that she was sorry he’d said such awful things to me.
I wanted to tell her that, as far as I could tell, he was pretty much being exactly how he normally is, that he was so mean I originally thought he might murder me, and that I was used to him saying awful things to me. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t her fault I was stupid enough to believe that Cash and I were friends. I wanted to tell her that it didn’t matter anymore, because he was dying and I was moving, so what was the point of getting my feelings hurt? But instead I just stared out the window at the passing houses and wiped my snotty nose on the back of my hand and thought about what a dumb jerk I was for thinking Cash had been hanging out with me because he’d wanted to.
“Can I get my things? I left them in Cash’s wheelbarrow,” I said when we pulled into the driveway. Dad was still up on the ladder, flashlight in his mouth, pulling gunk out of the gutter by the old CICM-HQ. I glanced at him, thinking about how secluded and important I felt up there for all those nights. Like I could just reach up and touch the planet I was trying to contact. And there Dad was, pulling old leaves and Blow Pop wrappers out of the gutters just like it was any other part of any other house.
“Sure, honey,” Sarah said as she fumbled around the visor until she located the garage door button. She pushed it and the door rumbled open. Right up front, there he was: Huey. Sitting in the wheelbarrow, just like always. Sarah walked up to it and poked around. “Is this the thing you two were working on together?” she asked. I nodded. “Maybe you should go ahead and take it, then. Just like Cash said. That way you can still work on it without him.”
I gazed at Huey. If Cash hadn’t gotten sick tonight, we would have been wheeling him up to the hill right about now. We would have been “Star-Spangled Banner”-ing the heck out of those Martians. And we would have been eating pastrami and pickles while we did it. “I’ll be right back,” I said.
I hurried across the yard. Our garage door was still open, since Dad was using the ladder. I went inside and found our wheelbarrow and wheeled it back to Cash’s house. One by one, I took the parts and pieces of Huey out of Cash’s wheelbarrow and put them in mine.
“Thank you,” I told Sarah as I backed out of the garage.
“Are you going to be okay, Arty?” she asked. “Why don’t you come inside? I’ll make us a snack. We can talk if you like. I don’t know much about space, but I know the stories my brother shared with me over the years.”
“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine.” I wasn’t sure if that was true, but it felt like the right thing to say.
“Okay,” Sarah said. She pushed a button to close the garage door. It hummed down steadily. “Well, if you change your mind, I’ll be here. I plan to stay until … well, you know.”
I guessed I did know. Until the end, is what she’d meant to say.
“Okay,” I said, then maneuvered the wheelbarrow in a slow circle until I had it pointed the right direction. I stared at Huey, jiggling inside, clanking against himself, almost as if he were jittery and excited about tonight’s adventure.
“Do us both a favor … destroy it … smash it to bits.…”
Tears collected in my eyes again as I thought about all our hard work putting Huey together. I’d been blind enough to think we were having fun, when to Cash all I was doing was invading his space—unwanted—and making him keep pursuing a dream he’d wanted to let die.
“Do us both a favor …”
Instead of heading straight over to our garage, I turned left and started through the backyard, my feet seeming to move without my willing them to. I pushed on straight for the woods.
Dad looked up when I passed him and turned the flashlight on me. “Arty?” he asked. “What do you have there? Where are you going? Arty?”
He kept calling after me as I plunged into the woods, but I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t. I was too busy hearing Cash’s horrible words in my mind, too busy seeing his papery grayish-white skin, too busy feeling his bellowing cough thunder through the room.
I practically ran down the path through the woods, not even worrying about bugs or bears or any of the other things I’d bothered Cash about that first night up the hill. All I could think of was getting to the top.
By the time I popped out into the clearing, I was sweating and crying and breathing really raggedly, like someone running from a monster in a horror movie. My whole body was shaking with rage and anger and fear and sadness and what felt like every emotion in the world rolled up into one. What I wouldn’t have given to be the Bacteria at that moment, the only thought in my mind one syll
I pushed Huey all the way to the zenith, where the moon shone down, and bent over with my hands on my knees, pulling in gaspy painful breaths.
“How could you?” I screamed, first to the ground, and then I looked up into the sky and repeated it, only louder, yelling at the moon. “How could you?” But I couldn’t go any further, because the question was locked and loaded with so many endings:
How could you give up on Huey?
How could you give up on us?
How could you kill my dreams?
But worst of all, how could you die without telling me? Didn’t I have a right to know? Isn’t that what friends do—warn each other that the worst is about to happen?
Sarah was right. Cash had said a lot of awful things to me at the hospital. He’d said awful, unforgivable, unforgettable things. She probably thought the worst was telling me I was always hanging around where I didn’t belong or something like that. But she was wrong. The meanest thing he’d said to me came at the very end: “Give up on space.” Because he might as well have been telling me to give up on … us.
With a growl, I grabbed the handles of the wheelbarrow and pulled up with all my might. A disassembled Huey tumbled out onto the ground with a horrifying crunch. Or maybe it was a gratifying crunch. Somehow it was both at the same time.
Two of the mirrors broke on the initial fall. This was the beginning of the end. I raced toward the edge of the woods again. I searched around until I found a big stick, which I carried back to the heap of parts and started wailing on them. The spotlight cracked, the mirrors burst, the metal dented. I pounded and kicked and grunted and cried and said words that made no sense. I pummeled Huey with all my might, doing just as Cash had told me to do—destroying him, smashing him to bits. Smashing our friendship to bits.
“Arty!” I heard in the distance, but I kept going. “Arty!” I heard again, only closer. Then I felt a pair of arms wrap around my waist and pick me up. “Arty, what’s going on? What are you doing? What’s wrong?” A torrent of questions into my twisting, contorted, angry face.