The Year We Fell From Space Read online

  Now he’s just living by himself and doesn’t have to take care of anything. Not even mowing the lawn outside of his apartment. Not even us. It’s been sixty-three days since we started our free fall from space and I haven’t seen him once even though he said we’d see him all the time. Just dark sky, like he got sucked into a black hole.

  So Mom freaks out sometimes. And Jilly can’t go outside anymore. And I draw maps and more maps and more maps—even on the walls of the science wing.

  Sundown is the best time of day.

  Twilight.

  Crepuscule. That’s a real word. It means twilight.

  Best time of day.

  I get my newest map, a few pencils, and my blanket. “I won’t be too long,” I say as I head to the hill.

  The hill is right behind our house. It’s not really our house—we rent it from an old guy named Lou. It’s a 1700s log cabin, now covered in ugly beige siding, built in the middle of fifty acres of woods. The hill is clear of trees, though, so the view of the night sky is big. It’s not a steep hill, so it’s easy to get to, and Lou keeps the trail cleared all year round.

  At the top, there’s a small, flat clearing. When it’s warmer, Mom and Dad let me sleep out here. Some people think it’s weird for me to sleep outside but Mom and Dad used to be hike guides and survival skills teachers. They lived along the Appalachian Trail for years. It’s how they met. They don’t agree on much anymore, but they will always agree that sleeping outside is good for you.

  I lay my blanket out and get ready to see each star pop out from its hiding place and wish on the first one.

  For the first forty days after Dad moved out I sat bundled in my snow clothes and wished Mom and Dad would get back together, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. For the last twenty-three days I didn’t know what to wish for. Tonight is different. I know what to wish for.

  There’s a screech owl out here somewhere. She screeches me to sleep every night, even in winter. Twilight is when she’s just waking up. I whisper, “Good morning, owl.”

  Mars is already visible in the western sky. Can’t miss her. She glows a faint red and in my mind she misses Venus. Even though the two planets don’t always travel together, I have this memory of when Dad first pointed them out to Jilly and me. Three years ago, we took a walk every night to see them—Venus brighter than anything in the night sky and Mars to her right, glowing red. Like Jilly and me, we said that night. Jilly is Venus. I’m Mars. I’m glowing faint red.

  I don’t know what I’m so angry about. Mom is a good mom. Jilly is annoying now that she doesn’t go outside anymore, but I can handle her. School is weird but I’m dealing with it okay. I wish they hadn’t asked me to wash my constellations off the science wing wall. I wish they would have asked me to draw more of them. Maybe that’s what I’m angry about.

  Sirius is the first star, right above me in the south sky.

  I say the poem about first-star-I-see-tonight and then I think hard about my wish.

  If I told you the wish, it wouldn’t come true, so you’ll just have to wait to find out.

  Rigel is the next star to show itself. Then Capella, then Betelgeuse. Slowly they all show themselves and Orion’s belt pops up between Rigel and Betelgeuse. I start to name the old constellations I know. Taurus, right where Mars is, Orion, of course, Cancer and Gemini right next to each other, and Leo to the left of them. And the Big Dipper, the soup ladle that helps you find Polaris the North Star, is right above my head.

  I pull out my map and face the opposite direction of Polaris because it’s the southern sky that’s been confusing me on this map. South—direction of Porter Drive where Dad now lives. Without us. Nothing confusing about that.

  I have a headlamp—the kind cave hikers wear—and I slip it on my head and stare at the map. I’ve left a big space where Leo should be. I look back at the sky to find the dots I need, but the sky is lit up in an odd way, as if someone has turned the sun back on. I turn off my headlamp and there’s a shooting star. Right then.

  People say shooting stars are rare, but they’re not. I see one every week.

  This one moves all the way through the sky, from east to west—it’s slower than most shooting stars I’ve seen and doesn’t seem to be burning out. And then it makes a turn. It looks like it’s coming right at me.

  I glance at my map again and make a pencil mark for Regulus, which is the brightest star of Leo. When I look back up, the shooting star is still there. But brighter. Closer. Slower. Aiming straight for me. I shake my head because I know that can’t be true. Things don’t just fall from space.

  But sometimes they do.

  But they don’t here.

  Or maybe they do. I don’t know.

  Because this one is coming right for me, on top of this hill, and I start to wonder if I’m going irrational like Dad did.

  It’s brighter than the sun. That’s all I know. It’s blinding and I can’t move. I sit on my blanket and stare at it through my fingers. The sound is there—like a jet and a storm rolled into one. I swear the ground is shaking.

  Liberty Johansen, you are not going irrational.

  The light comes closer and I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what to do. I try to remember everything Dad ever taught me about meteors and meteorites, but I don’t remember anything. Or, what I do remember is too scary to think about … so I run through vocabulary words.

  An asteroid is a small rock orbiting the sun. A meteoroid is a small part of a comet or asteroid. A meteor is the light show a meteoroid makes when it passes through Earth’s atmosphere—a shooting star. A meteorite is a meteoroid that makes it through the atmosphere and lands on Earth.

  This is a meteor. A light show. A trick. That’s all it is. But the ground is still shaking and I know it’s not in my imagination because the screech owl has stopped screeching and the trees are making a sound like wind and there’s no wind and the light is so bright. So bright. And there’s a trail of smoke behind the light.

  An airplane has gone on fire and is about to crash. A satellite component is falling to Earth. Liberty Johansen, this is not a spaceship.

  BOOM!

  The air is knocked out of my lungs. I can’t breathe right. I think I hear glass breaking, but I’m not sure where and I could be imagining it. Before I can figure out what to do, there’s a bright flash.

  The flash lasts longer than the boom. When I look back up, everything is dark again. I can breathe, but I’m so scared, I’m barely breathing at all.

  I think I just went irrational.

  But then something small, like a pebble, falls from the sky and hits me on my head and lands in my lap.

  I cover my head with my arms and only then can I hear Mom yelling for me. I try to yell back but between the lack of air in my lungs and the fact that I’m temporarily frozen, I can’t say anything at all.

  “Lib! Liberty!” Mom calls.

  I hear her at the base of the path to the hill. “Liberty! Answer me! Come home!”

  I hear her run back, sneakers crossing the deck, and the sliding door open and then close again. Then I hear something above me in the tree limbs—like something is falling fast—the same way it sounds when deer run through the woods. Branches crack and twigs fall.

  There’s a thud. It’s loud. It’s to my right, down the hill a bit. It sounds like the time I fell off the monkey bars at recess. Thud. Something heavy.

  I don’t want to move.

  I don’t want to move until I know what just happened.

  I don’t want to move until I know for sure an alien isn’t waiting for me, ready to take me back to its spaceship and dissect me. I still can’t see right. I blink a few times. I stare up and try to find Mars to get my bearings. It’s there, glowing a faint red.

  I stand up and try to figure out what just happened.

  This isn’t what I wished for.

  I shine my headlamp toward where the thud noise came from. Something new is in the woods. I think it’s a meteori
te. A lot bigger than the one that hit me on the head. I picture it glowing red, like Mars and me. I can’t tell how big it is, but I know it can’t be too big because if it was even the size of a small car when it was in space, and it fell, there’s a good chance I’d be dead. And Mom and Jilly. And Lou and his wife, Veronica, who live up the lane. We’d all be dead. I know that.

  I know it was probably moving hundreds of thousands of miles per hour when it hit the ground. I know it’s not really glowing red, but my eyes are making it seem that way in the lamplight. I stay rational. That’s the pie I bought when Dad left. I’ve been pretending Mom made it for me all this time, but really I made it myself. Rational pie.

  “What the heck was that?” Jilly says when I walk in the door.

  “No idea,” I say.

  “You didn’t see it?” she asks.

  Mom is busy looking at the two kitchen windows that are missing chunks of glass and sweeping the floor with a broom to catch the pieces. “Jilly, go sit down. You don’t have any shoes on.”

  “Was it a spaceship?” Jilly asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Did something crash?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “You look weird.”

  “I feel weird.”

  “Maybe you got adducked by aliens.”

  “Abducted,” Mom corrects from the kitchen.

  I say, “It was probably a meteorite. Sometimes bigger ones break through Earth’s atmosphere.”

  “How do we know you’re telling the truth? Maybe they brainwashed you.” Jilly smiles.

  “I like when you’re funny,” I say.

  She frowns.

  I feel the small meteorite in my pocket. I roll it between my fingers and my thumb. Something about it makes me feel okay.

  Lou, our landlord, comes driving down the lane in his truck. He parks and then he’s suddenly in our house. When Dad lived here, Lou would knock first and wait.

  “Well, I’ll be,” he says, looking at the pile of glass on the kitchen floor. “I’ve seen a lot of things. Never saw a storm that fast.”

  “Liberty thinks it was a meteorite,” Mom says. Jilly is jumping up and down to get Lou’s attention, but he’s in the kitchen and she’s stuck barefoot in the living room until Mom is sure all the glass is cleaned up.

  “Would have had to be a big meteor!” he laughs.

  “I was out there,” I say. “I watched it.”

  He turns to me and makes that face like he’s impressed.

  I say, “It’s not like it’s snowing.”

  He nods. Lou’s a hunter. I think he likes that I hang out on his hill and that I like nature. I don’t like that he kills animals and mounts their heads on his wall, but I guess people have to do whatever makes them happy.

  “I think it was aliens,” Jilly says. “Coming down to see if humans are worth talking to.”

  Lou says, “If you were an alien, would you think we were worth talking to?”

  “Some of us, maybe,” Jilly says.

  “Sweetheart, if the aliens met you first, I bet they’d think we were worth it,” Lou says. Then he turns to Mom and says, “I’ll go get the cardboard.”

  Jilly takes her place on the couch and we listen to Mom telling Lou she can tape the windows up herself. She has to insist. Lou doesn’t say anything dumb this time about Dad not being here to help. He just leaves the cardboard in the kitchen and drives away in his truck.

  It’s not like I’m trying to keep it a secret. People don’t like to talk about this kind of stuff. Especially not to kids because they think we’ll get big ideas in our heads or that we’ll worry. Of course, we worry anyway, so it’s better that we know.

  I don’t know much.

  I know Dad has depression. That he gets angry a lot. That he yells a lot. And then, after a day or two or four, he turns into an apology machine and acts like everything is fine.

  You never know how long it will last.

  You never know why it’s happening.

  Mom finally took him to a doctor two years ago— when I was Jilly’s age—and they don’t really talk to us about it.

  So now you know what I know.

  Which isn’t much, like I said.

  But I should tell you that on our night walks when I was little Dad and I used to make up songs about the stars so I could remember them better. By the time I was eight, I knew most of the old constellations. By the time I was nine, I was making my own. The stars were our thing. They were outside where Dad felt best, and they were bright, and dependable. Just like Dad on camping trips and in emergencies like when the power went out or a tree fell and blocked the driveway. He was great with all that. He wasn’t very good with humans.

  I don’t know what aliens would think about humans if they came here. Humans are weird. We have some problems, I guess. I care more about stars than I care about humans anyway. Humans have been nothing but a pain in my butt so far. Which makes me more like Dad. And I’d be lying if I said that didn’t worry me.

  Once Lou leaves, I want more than anything to go back out and see the meteorite, but when I pick up my unfinished star map and move toward the door, Mom says, “Can you skip it for tonight, Lib? Not sure what happened out there but I’m nervous.”

  I nod and put my map on the table.

  Jilly says, “I’m tired,” and flops into Mom’s arms.

  So Mom sends her to bed and reads her a story about dragons and when Mom comes back down, I help her tape up the second broken window.

  In bed, I look at my star map. The dots connect and look like a broken window and one of Jilly’s imaginary aliens.

  The shapes change depending on what the stars want me to think about.

  Before I went to the hill tonight, this map had the letter R, a book, and something round, like a ring.

  Taped up on my ceiling, which is slanted because the attic is right under the roof, there are still three maps I never finished from winter. The dots are there but I could never see anything in them. Usually the shapes just pop out at me and I can see things clearly. But winter was hard. I think that’s why I can’t connect the dots.

  I pick up the map from tonight and I connect dots for a spaceship, an alien, and a broken window. It takes me a few minutes, tops. No problem. I date and sign the map at the bottom. March 22, 2019, Liberty Johansen.

  I get back into bed and stare up at the old maps from winter. I stand up a few times and make certain stars bigger dots. I tilt my head to either side and squint. Still no pictures or shapes or ideas pop out. Maybe that’s the thing about bad winters. There are no connections. There’s nothing you can do with the dots.

  Saturdays used to be fun.

  We would clean our rooms early and then go places together and do things. Like the farmer’s market or hiking at Hawk Mountain or maybe a trip to the lake to watch birds. Sometimes Dad would take us fishing. Sometimes Mom would take us out on the trails to test a new kind of boots they sent her from work. Mom tests boots. And backpacks. And camping stoves and tents and hatchets and just about anything they sell in the Outdoor World catalog, where she works. Sometimes Jilly and I would play all day outside on the swing set or in the woods or in the stream behind our house. Sometimes we’d climb into Lou’s tree stands in the forest and pretend we were birds, high above everything else.

  Now Jilly takes forever to clean her room on Saturday mornings and whines the whole time. Today Mom is using the magic box trick. The magic box trick is simple: Put one hundred things in this box that do not give you joy. That’s how Mom says it. What she really means is: Put one hundred things in the box that you don’t play with anymore, don’t need, or don’t want. Jilly wants and needs everything these days so today’s magic box will take a while.

  Now Mom has a second job writing about trails, national parks, and survival stuff for some hippy hiker website and she doesn’t have as much time as she used to on weekends, so Jilly taking forever to fill the magic box is probably fine.

  I go ou
tside and to the hill and I wonder if I imagined everything from last night. Sure, Liberty. A meteorite just fell from the sky into your yard, of all places.

  At the top of the hill I look down to see if it’s still there. It’s still there.

  Sure, Liberty, there’s a big meteorite in the woods. Okay.

  But it happened. Just because some people won’t believe me doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I was there.

  Most people have a hard time believing stuff.

  That’s the whole point of my star maps.

  The Mayans saw different pictures in the sky. The Chinese have their own old star maps. Everyone does. Different shapes. Different names for each constellation. Why are we stuck with gods and bears and queens and warriors? I see toasters. I see hats and unicorns and ice skates. I see anything I want to see because all the sky gives us is dots. It’s our job to connect them. Why would I connect them the same way some guy thousands of years ago did? They didn’t even have electricity back then. They were still dying from diseases we don’t even get anymore.

  So maybe the science teacher doesn’t like that I make up my own constellations. Who cares? Just because he doesn’t like it doesn’t mean I won’t keep doing it.

  And just because no one will believe a meteorite the size of a football landed in my woods doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

  I sit next to it and touch it. It’s cold, same as any other rock. It’s not the same color as other rocks around here, though. Mostly we have red rocks. Sometimes a bit of blue limestone. This thing is light brown like sand, and it has spots. It’s smooth—almost as smooth as if it had been in a river for a hundred years or more. I don’t know what to do with it. I can’t leave it here. I can’t hide it out here. I can’t bury it.