Tuesday · 9:12 p.m. Grace period: 72 h 46 m remaining
Kyle Brekke ran the cord. Nobody had asked him to. He found a hundred-foot spool of phone line in the IT closet, spliced it to a spare headset base with a pair of scissors and a great deal of electrical tape, and fed it out through the fire door by the break room, which Tollefson had propped open with a folding chair. The cord lay across the loading apron and the first row of parking spaces and ended in my hand, in the lot, under the fourth light from the building. I could stand out there for the thing I had asked for and still be on the call.
"It's not rated for weather," Kyle said. "It's not rated for anything. If it rains, don't hold it."
It wasn't going to rain. The wind had come around to the northwest at sunset and taken every cloud in the state with it, and the frost was already on the windshields. The sky over the lot was the clear, hard black you get here about six times a year, with too many stars in it. High in the south, over the roof of the Hy-Vee, was the Moon.
I had looked at it every night of my life without once being asked to. It was a little more than half full, the bright side toward the right and the dark side to the left, the way it is in the first week after a half. You could see the whole disc if you looked for it. The lit part was white as a dinner plate. The rest was a faint brown-gray, like the shape of a plate after you've lifted it off the tablecloth.
The parking lot was fuller than it had been at noon. The thirty-six of the second shift had been told they could go home and hadn't, and stood in twos and threes near their cars with coffee in paper cups from the machine. Along the far edge of the lot, behind a line of yellow tape the lieutenant had strung between two lot lights, stood the news crews, six trucks now, masts down, cameras on tripods aimed not at the building but up. Somebody had told them where to point. I didn't have to ask who.
The Minneapolis agents stood together by the loading apron in their vests and didn't look at me. Tollefson had brought the folding chair out from the fire door for me and I had not sat in it.
At 9:12 I asked Hollis how long.
"Thirty-nine minutes."
"Can you tell me when it's a minute out, and count from there?"
"Yes."
Mrs. Hultgren's Buick came into the lot at 9:20 with one headlight aimed slightly at the ground. She parked it by the fire door, across two spaces, and got out in her church coat and a knit hat, and went around to the passenger door and opened it, and Junie got out.
I had called at supper. I'd stood in the break room with the landline on the wall and said what I had. I said there was going to be something on the Moon at 9:51, and that I had asked for it, and that I would like her to be there. She had thought about it, on the phone, for about as long as it takes to check a number.
"Is it going to hurt anybody?"
"No."
"Is it going to hurt the Moon?"
I had not thought of that as a question anyone would ask. "A little," I said. "It leaves a mark."
"I want to see it," Junie said. "Everyone at school knows already. Bryn's mom saw you on TV. I said that's my mom and she said no it isn't."
She wore her winter coat over her pajamas, the flannel ones with the small trombones on them that Marisol had bought for her, and her boots, unlaced, and Tollefson's binoculars.
Tollefson had lent them to her at 4:30 that afternoon, when she'd come by for ten minutes after school. Birds, he'd said, when she asked what they were for. Elk, sometimes. He told her to keep the strap around her neck. She'd kept it there for five hours.
She walked across the lot to me in her unlaced boots, exactly as fast as she wished, and stopped a yard away, and looked at the cord in my hand, and up the length of it to the fire door.
"That's a lot of wire," she said.
"It's a hundred feet."
"Mrs. H says I can stay till 10:30. Then I'm supposed to be in bed, but she says she'll see."
"She'll see," said Mrs. Hultgren, arriving. She stood at Junie's shoulder in her church coat with her purse in both hands and looked at me. Her face does not change much, and it changed now. It didn't get softer. It got exact, the way she looks at a syringe.
"I didn't tell her anything," she said. "I only said you asked her to come."
"That's what happened."
"Then that's what I said."
Marisol came out of the fire door at 9:32, still in her headset, which she pulled off when she reached the cord and coiled around her fist. She was in her fourteenth hour and had just taken a call from someone in Ohio, and she looked like she'd been wrung out and set out to dry. She kissed Junie on the top of the head and put a pouch of fruit snacks in her coat pocket. Then she stood next to me and looked at the Moon and not at me.
"They said you asked for it," she said.
"I asked for proof."
"Honey." She still wasn't looking. "You asked them for this?"
"I asked if the service was real."
"And it's real."
"Yes."
Marisol put her hand on my back, between the shoulder blades, and left it there. She didn't say anything else. I have never known her to go quiet on a hard thing.
At 9:38 Haugen crossed the lot and stopped at the distance he'd kept from me all day. "Washington is landing someone tonight," he said. "When they get here, you'll be asked to make room."
"It talks to one person."
"Then they'll ask nicely." He looked at the cord in my hand. "I'm telling you now so it doesn't come as a surprise."
At 9:42 Tollefson's phone rang and he held it out to me without a word, and Priya Raman said, "I'm at the telescope feed. I have it on a monitor from a station in Chile that has nothing else to do tonight. I'm going to stay on. I won't talk."
"Thank you," I said.
"You can hang up on me if you want."
"I don't hang up."
"I know," said Priya. "I read your file."
She stayed on. Tollefson held his phone to his chest, and it said nothing at all, in the cold, for nine minutes.
Nobody in the lot said much. A man near the yellow tape held an infant up to the sky in a blanket, as you would at a parade.
At 9:44 the first phone lit. It was in the news crew's line, a little blue rectangle held at eye level, and someone's voice said, "Yeah, I'm here. No, I'm at work. Go outside. Just go outside, Ma." By 9:47 there were a dozen. The lot became a field of small blue lights, held at chests and at ears, and every one had somebody on the other end of it being told to go stand in a yard.
At 9:50 Hollis said, "One minute."
I relayed it. I said it a little louder than I meant to. Haugen's phone came down from his ear and he checked his watch, and then Tollefson checked his. It was 9:50:04. Sixty, to the second.
"Fifty."
9:50:14 on Tollefson's screen as I said it back. Fifty, to the second. Hollis had put its numbers where they'd be true when they got to me.
"Forty."
I said it. Junie had the binoculars up. Mrs. Hultgren had a hand on the back of her collar.
"Thirty."
"Hollis," I said. I said it quietly, because it wasn't for the room. "Could you stop counting?"
It took the gap. It took the next second too, and I stood in the cold holding a hundred feet of cord.
"Yes."
It stopped.
Nothing came down the wire after that but the level hiss. I looked at Tollefson's phone. 9:50:44. I kept the count myself.
"Ten," I said, at 9:50:54, to no one.
Junie stood with the strap around her neck and both hands on the binoculars and her head tipped back so far her hat fell off.
At 9:51:04, in the dark part of the Moon, low and to the left, there was a light.
It was white. That was all I could have told anyone. There was no color in it and no shape beyond a point, and it was brighter than anything else in that part of the sky, so bright I could tell it wasn't a star and wasn't a plane. It lasted about as long as it takes to say the word. Then it wasn't a point. It was a flare on the dark face, the size of a grain of rice held at arm's length. Then it was gone, and the dark part of the Moon was dark, the brown-gray of a lifted plate.
The lot did not make a sound.
Two hundred people, the news crews' generators, a wind out of the northwest, and it was as quiet as the inside of an unplugged headset. The infant made a small surprised sound. A phone somewhere near the yellow tape said Ma? Ma, are you— and then didn't.
"There," said Junie.
"I saw it," said Marisol, very low, in the voice she uses for Brightline.
The hiss ran in my ear. It had not changed.
Then Junie said, "Mom. It's still there."
I looked. I couldn't see it. I looked at the dark part of the Moon, low and left, and there was the brown-gray, and the terminator, the line between the lit and dark, sharp as a paper cut, and at the edge of it, a tiny bright grain, like a piece of the lit side that had come loose and hung over the shadow.
"Up and to the left," Junie said. She hadn't taken the binoculars down. "You're looking at the wrong Moon."
There is one Moon. I have checked. I said so.
"Give me a second."
I gave her one. I gave her two. She held the binoculars out backward, without looking, and I took them and got the strap over my head, and lifted them. The lens was cold enough to hurt. I found the Moon by its lit edge and the dark seas and moved up and to the left as I'd been told, and there was the terminator, with mountains on it throwing shadows a hundred miles long. I had never seen the mountains before. Where she'd said, I couldn't find a thing. A smear, maybe. A place where the light was slightly wrong. My hands were shaking, and the Moon shook with them.
"It's so bright," Junie said.
"Yes," I said.
I couldn't see it, and I wasn't going to tell her that.
The spark stayed four minutes. I know because Tollefson counted it on his phone, holding the phone up in front of his face, and because Priya said at the end of the four minutes, from his chest, "It's gone." The plume, she said, had come up out of the shadow into the sunlight above the surface and been lit from below for as long as it took to fall back. It wasn't the crater. The crater was in darkness. The terminator wouldn't reach the crater for two days.
"Ms. Pruitt," she said. "How big is it?"
"I'd have to ask."
"I'll tell you. I have the profile of the ejecta and the time of the flash. It's about a kilometer, give or take. About what Item 7 is." She stopped there. "I said I wouldn't talk."
"It's all right."
"It isn't," said Priya. "Thank you."
I asked Hollis the only thing I could think of.
"Was anyone hurt?"
The lot had started to make noise again. Somebody was crying, in a way I've heard on the line a great many times and have never known how to score. The Minneapolis agents had closed into a knot around Haugen.
"No one lives there."
I passed that to Tollefson. He had the phone at his side now, and he'd put his other hand over his face.
I started on the phrase that comes out at the end of every call, and stopped it, and said something else. "How long will it be visible?"
"The item's remains will be visible from the premises for as long as the Moon is."
"And the crater?"
"It will not be repaired."
I had asked to see the meter, and now there was a hole in the Moon that would still be there when Junie was eighty. I said it back for the room, in the words I'd been given. Haugen wrote them down.
Priya came back on, and this time she talked. "You'll get extra meteors for a couple of weeks. Small ones. Some of what came off it is on its way here. Nobody needs to worry about that." She paused. "I'm going to have to go and be told I'm wrong by some very smart people. I'll be there by morning."
The line went dead in Tollefson's hand.
Junie had found my other hand somewhere in all this. Her fingers were cold and sticky with the fruit snacks, and they'd been in my hand for some time. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking at the place where the light had been.
"That's where it is," she said. "Right there. I'll show you again tomorrow."
"All right."
"It's not going to be there tomorrow, Mom. It'll be dark. But I'll show you where."
"You do that," I said.
Mrs. Hultgren, on her other side, put her purse on the asphalt and got down to Junie's height in her church coat with a small sound in her knees, and said something in her ear I couldn't hear, and Junie said, "Mrs. H, I'm fine," and Mrs. Hultgren said, "I know you are. I'm asking anyway."
By ten the phones were the only light in the lot, and every one of them was talking. Every screen had the same picture on it, or one like it, taken from a driveway in Rapid City or a porch in Des Moines by somebody who'd been called and told to go stand outside. At 10:20 car doors began slamming on 41st, one after another down the block. People were driving toward the building, the one place they'd heard of that was on the phone.
Mrs. Hultgren took Junie home at 10:30, which was when she'd said. She was carrying the boots. Junie had fallen asleep in the Buick by the time it turned out of the lot, her head against the window and Tollefson's binoculars in her lap with both hands on them.
Tollefson had watched them go. "She can keep them," he said.
"They're yours."
"I've got another pair," he said.
Marisol didn't go back in. She stood beside me with the coiled headset in her hand, in the cold, and neither of us said anything. I thought about a number, and not the kilometer. Two hundred and ninety-one million, four hundred thousand kilometers was how far off Item 7 was, the thing that was next. Seven hundred and sixty Moons.
I did not say any of that to Marisol. She has taken calls from people who said it to her.
At 11:20, with Haugen across the apron on his phone, I asked it something that wasn't on anyone's page.
"What do you do when nobody's calling?"
The hiss ran its length, and a little past it.
"I wait. I am good at it."
I didn't say it aloud. Marisol was looking at the Moon.
At 11:40 a black SUV came up 41st Street from the direction of the airport with its lights off and its hazards on, and the lieutenant lifted the tape without being asked and let it through. A second one followed. The first stopped by the fire door, across two of Mrs. Hultgren's spaces, and a woman got out of the back before the driver could come around to her side.
She was about my mother's age, in a dark wool coat, with short gray hair cut in a way that didn't need any help, and a phone in each hand. She looked at the lot. She looked at the news trucks and the tape and the second shift and the Minneapolis agents, and she took in the folding chair and the hundred feet of phone line taped across the asphalt to my hand, and she read all of it, in about the time it takes to read a form. Then she walked straight across the lot to me, through the field of blue lights, and stopped exactly one arm's length away.
I was holding Tollefson's chair by its back with one hand, the headset cord in the other, and my cell in the pocket of my coat, buzzing.
"Ms. Pruitt," she said. She had a warm voice. "I'm Alma Kessler. I wish we were meeting some other way. Which one of these is your phone?"