Chapter Seven

I showed up at Dr. Bradley’s office at 9:00 a.m. the next day.

“Jesus, you’re prompt,” she said, squinting at me. “Isn’t this your summer vacation? Shouldn’t you be staying up until midnight and sleeping until eleven to restore your sleep bank?”

I stared at her blankly. Adults, man. “I’m used to waking up at six for school.” This morning, I’d woken at six and knocked on Ethan’s door, and we’d gone down for a dip in the ocean. I’d been surprised by how comfortable it’d felt.

“Cruel and unusual punishment,” she muttered. “Thank god I’ll never have to do that again.” She waved a hand at the room’s second seat, a wobbly-looking wooden chair. “You can sit…there.”

I sat and took in the office. A disaster, like Dad’s at home, which I found reassuring. My chair had an uneven leg; I’d need to stuff a wad of papers under it at my first possible chance.

I waited for instructions. I was ready to do whatever grunt work Cora wanted—data entry, scrub the windows, get a breakfast sandwich. But Cora simply stared right back at me, clutching an exceedingly large coffee mug.

Finally, she spoke. “Okay, so, you should probably start with some background reading…”

“I’m reading your dissertation.” I’d started at two in the morning, when I’d woken and been unable to fall back asleep.

She blinked. “You are? How did you even find it?”

“It’s online.”

“It should be under lock and key.” She shook her head. “Okay, well. Why don’t I give you an overview and set you up.”

She did, and I got started on background reading. Which was, frankly, a little terrifying. Apparently space was a junkyard no one had jurisdiction over. Old satellites, rocket parts, fuel tanks, and other debris floated endlessly. Every time anything collided in space, it created more debris, which increased the chance of the International Space Station or satellites or tsunami warning systems or anything else up there getting harmed.

“Dr. Bradley?” I asked when she took a break to make more coffee.

“You can call me Cora.”

Interesting proposition; I’d probably avoid calling her anything. “Okay. I have a question. People know about this, right? You know about it, I assume the government and the EPA know—why isn’t more being done?”

She tilted her head, as though waiting for me to expound.

“If we know it’s bad, why are billionaires allowed to send up stuff that gets turned into trash during space storms?” I hadn’t even known solar storms existed until today; now I knew the sun, usually consistent, occasionally ejected solar material capable of messing with Earth’s magnetic field and knocking a satellite out of orbit. “Why aren’t we talking about space debris and cleaning it up or telling people they can’t launch whatever they want into space?”

“Mm.” She stirred some cream into her coffee. “Well, it’s hard for people to look further than the immediate future, at how this could impact our ability to explore space. And there’s no regulation for what people can do—no one owns space. It’s like the Wild West.”

“The final frontier,” I murmured.

She grinned. “Exactly. And some of us are talking about how to clean it up. Giant nets, magnets, spacecraft capable of pushing deactivated satellites into the atmosphere so they burn up. Harpoons, even. But they’re wildly expensive to build. Also, you need people to agree to them. Imagine if the US said it was going to send up a harpoon to take down a decommissioned satellite—other countries might be wary, because what’s to stop us from taking down one of their working satellites?” She took a sip of coffee. “It becomes a huge international problem.”

“So do we need a…space committee? Who’s in charge of space?”

“There’s regional programs. We have NASA, and there’s the European Space Agency. Russia, China, Japan, India all have their own programs. Getting them to work together…” She shrugged.

“Okay, so…” I rubbed my forehead. “We have to figure out where all the debris is, find a way to pick it all up, fund it, and get governments all over the world to sign off.”

“Great.” Cora smothered a smile. “I look forward to chairing your thesis committee in ten years.”

“What?”

“Bad joke,” she said, still laughing to herself.

I eyed her. Sounded like the kind of joke Dad made.

“Do you want to get lunch?” Cora asked. “I thought we’d go out since it’s your first day.”

I brightened. “Yeah, let’s.”

We walked to a sandwich shop on the edge of a park. “There’s walking paths and boardwalks through there.” Cora nodded at the thickening woods as we took our sandwiches to a picnic table. “It used to be a pond or a bog or something.”

“Cool.” I took a bite of my pickle, savoring the briny flavor. “How did you end up on Nantucket? How long have you been here?”

“Nantucket has a whole history of astronomy. This is my second summer here—I’ve got the funding for one more, too.”

“Did you always want to be an astrophysicist?” I almost tripped over the consonants.

She didn’t laugh at me. “I was always interested in space. What about you? Do you know what you want to major in?”

From most people, I hated this question, but Cora seemed genuinely interested—and also, I was a bit in awe of her. “I dunno. Something with numbers.” There was a beauty to equations, the way they always worked out in the end, the way they could make sense of the world. I thought if we knew enough about math, we could explain life itself, the way we’d explained the tides and the planets and the seasons.

As we walked back into town after lunch, Dr. Bradley stumbled to a halt. I glanced over to see her gazing fixedly at a man walking toward us. “Let’s cross here,” she said, and sped across the road despite the lack of crosswalk.

I jogged after her. “Who was that?” I asked after a block. “Bad date?”

She grimaced apologetically. “Yeah, actually. Not in the mood for awkward small talk.”

“Relatable.”

So Cora was dating. Cora was a smart, ambitious woman, who dated men, and she was only a few years younger than Dad. Good to know.

We returned to the office, and the afternoon hours fell away. Cora showed me how to pull reports comparing her latest location-calculating algorithms with those of colleagues making similar efforts and how to check them over. This had to be done any time she made a change in her calculations, to make sure nothing had been thrown out of whack. We mostly worked in silence, but every so often Cora came across something she thought I ought to know and called me over to explain it. Twice, other researchers stopped by to chat.

As the afternoon wound down, Dad texted to see when I wanted to be picked up before we headed to Golden Doors for Shabbat. I glanced at Cora. “What time are you heading out?”

“Five-ish today,” she said. “And I know we talked about you being nine-to-five, but it’s fine if you ever have to come in late or leave early. I’m here until ten some days, so don’t try to keep to my schedule.”

“Okay,” I said. “But—today you’re leaving at five?”

“Yeah, on Fridays I like to pretend I have some work-life balance.”

Big goals.

It took some maneuvering to walk out at the same time as Cora, but I managed it, telling Dad I was running a few minutes late so I could wait for my boss to be ready. Outside, I pretended not to see Ethan’s Jeep waiting at the curb; pretended not to feel my phone buzzing in my pocket. Instead I kept Cora chatting until Dad climbed out of the passenger seat. “Jordan!”

“Dad, hi!” My gaze ran over him, evaluating. Worn jeans, blue T-shirt—faded, but luckily unstained by laundry bleach, and with minimal holes. His hair—what little you could see of it from underneath his once blue, now gray Red Sox hat—flew out horizontally.

Not precisely the outfit I’d have suggested wearing when meeting my hot, accomplished boss for the first time, but since he’d had no idea 1) he’d be meeting her, or 2) I now had an agenda regarding them, I’d give him a pass. He looked okay, even if he was wearing socks with his sandals. Sometimes you couldn’t save someone from themselves.

“This is my dad,” I said to Cora, making no move toward him, so he had to cross the road to us. He did, a fleeting, almost fearful look on his face. Ha. I smiled when he reached us. “Dad, this is my boss, Dr. Bradley.”

They shook hands. “I’m Cora.”

“Tony.”

“Cora’s mapping space debris,” I said. “My dad’s also doing research here. He’s working on a book.”

“Really. What’s the book about?”

“Uh—” Dad cleared his throat. “It’s about, uh—Each chapter focuses on a different individual who contributed, during the sixteenth through early twentieth century, to advancing the field of maritime navigation and cartography—”

Good lord. Dad was usually much better at his elevator pitch. “He wrote an article for The Atlantic about Benjamin Franklin and his Nantucket family members mapping the Gulf Stream,” I butted in. “It went viral.”

Dad hung his head; Cora’s face lit up. “I read that! You wrote it?”

“Yeah.” Dad brought his hand up to the back of his head.

“That’s great,” Cora said. “I’m going to have to check it out again.”

Dad grimaced. “Oh, uh, thanks.”

Time to get out before more awkwardness commenced. “Okay,” I chirped. “Thanks, Dr. Bradley, see you Monday!”

I hustled my dad toward the Jeep. Ethan twisted toward me from the front passenger seat. “How was your first day?”

“Just dandy. Except for the fact that we seem as set on polluting space as we are on polluting Earth.”

Ethan looked alarmed. “That sounds bad.”

“You’re not wrong.” I wanted to ask Dad what he’d thought of Cora, but if he thought I was trying to set him up, he’d probably never speak to her again. Instead, I had to be subtle. I had to arrange for them to be in each other’s presence by seeming happenstance. Adults were very fragile. You had to make everything seem like their idea.

At Golden Doors, Dad and I were swiftly separated. The adults whisked him off, while Ethan and I were corralled into helping with dinner. Cooking fell into the teens’ purview at Golden Doors; as far as I could tell, the adults never made dinner, instead treating themselves to a cocktail hour while the kids cooked everything.

“It’s their greatest scam,” Shira told me as we husked corn, pulling the silky strands away from yellow and white kernels. “It’s why they procreated.”

“I think they’re playing an even longer con,” Iris said from further down the counter. She and the other triplets chopped heirloom tomatoes, dark red mottled with green, each segment so juicy I struggled not to grab them all. “They say we’ll be rewarded by forcing our own offspring to cook for us down the line. But really it’s a psychological trick to condition us into wanting kids so they’ll have grandchildren.”

This caused the older teens to exchange terrified glances. It caused me to stare at Iris in wonder. I liked anyone who thought in terms of generational long cons.

Dinner was crusty French country bread, tomato-basil bruschetta, grilled corn gazpacho, and peach salad with goat cheese. Everyone filled their plates before heading outside to picnic tables. I found myself crammed in at a table with Ethan and the rest of the cousins his age—his brothers, green-haired David and artsy Oliver; wide-eyed Miriam; and the New York pair, Shira and Noah.

Dad sat with Ethan’s parents as well as the OG Mr. and Mrs. Barbanel—ninetysomething Helen and her husband, Edward. Helen Barbanel led the prayers. At our table, Shira offered to let me light our two white pillars, and when I declined did so herself. The rest of the prayers were familiar, even if I’d forgotten some of them. But I remembered how much Dad always liked the blessing for children, even if we hadn’t done it forever.

I’d been nervous about Shabbat, but this was so normal, so easy. Dinner stretched long, the sun sinking below the horizon in a dying burst of color well past eight. Afterward, everyone idly milled about, some sipping drinks, others playing cornhole. Without the sun, the temperature dropped rapidly. It was still mid-June, not even officially summer until next week, and this close to the water the sea breeze cooled everything down.

Shira, Miriam, and I sat on lounge chairs and plucked dark red cherries from the bowl on the coffee table. “There’s a party tonight,” Shira said. “If you want to come.”

“I absolutely want to come. I have no plans basically forever.” I bit into a cherry, closing my eyes at the sweetness, then opening them to admire the deep, opaque ruby of the fruit.

“Can I come too?” Miriam asked from Shira’s other side.

Shira frowned at her fifteen-year-old cousin. “I don’t know…”

“Please,” Miriam said. “I’ll be so well-behaved.”

“Hm.”

“What time it’s at?” I asked.

Shira checked her phone. “We’ll probably leave in half an hour.”

“Nice. Let me say bye to my dad and change into something warmer.” And cooler.

I found Dad talking earnestly with Ethan’s parents and grandparents around the firepit. I perched on the edge of his Adirondack chair, listening for an opening in their conversation.

“And do you really think Ethan should give the talk?” Ethan’s father was saying, looking incredulous. “If your funding depends on it?”

“I wouldn’t say the funding depends on it,” Dad said, laughing this off, though I gave Ethan’s dad a sharp look. I wouldn’t have been thrilled by my own father sounding so surprised by my capabilities—probably because he often was. “I’m the one submitting the proposal. But Ethan has been doing the research on Frederick Gibson, and it’s just a little talk, part of mine—it’ll be a good experience for him.”

“It’s very kind of you,” Ethan’s dad said. “But don’t feel like you have to let him.”

“I don’t,” Dad said.

“What talk?” I asked.

The adults looked at me like they hadn’t noticed I was there. Classic. “The Gibson Foundation is going to be hosting a conference in August,” Dad said. “Mostly it’s a fundraiser—a few talks, a dinner—but they’re also taking meetings for grant proposals.”

Ah, grants, a magical word. Sing, o muse, of the ingenious hero with plentiful funding. Grants were a big deal in Dad’s world. Sure, his publisher paid him for his books, but not enough to live on. He was always applying to different institutions, writing long pages about why he was worthy. The public school he taught at paid him, sure, but teachers’ salaries were nothing to write home about. To afford all his re-creations of historical methods—not to mention, say, his daughter’s upcoming college education—he needed an extra income stream.

I wanted to ask Dad how much the grant was for and if he thought he had a chance at it. If getting it meant we wouldn’t have to sell our house. But I wouldn’t embarrass Dad by bringing up money in front of the Barbanels, who probably valued grants for prestige, not financing.

“Cool,” I said instead, and turned to Ethan’s parents. “You must be proud of Ethan, for his talk.”

They looked surprised. “Uh, yes, we are,” his mom said.

Weird vibe. I turned to Dad. “I’m gonna go hang out with Shira. See you tomorrow?”

“We’ll get brunch,” he promised. “What are you guys up to?”

“Just hanging.”

“Have fun,” he said. We hugged, and I smiled and headed out to see what Nantucket parties had to offer.