Bewilderment

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BUT WE MIGHT NEVER FIND THEM? We’d set up the scope on the deck, on a clear autumn night, on the edge of one of the last patches of darkness in the eastern U.S. Darkness this good was hard to come by, and so much darkness in one place lit up the sky. We pointed the tube through a gap in the trees above our rented cabin. Robin pulled his eye from the eyepiece—my sad, singular, newly turning nine-year-old, in trouble with this world.

“Exactly right,” I said. “We might never find them.”

I always tried to tell him the truth, if I knew it and it wasn’t lethal. He knew when I lied, anyway.

But they’re all over, right? You guys have proved it.

“Well, not exactly proved.”

Maybe they’re too far away. Too much empty space or something.

His arms pinwheeled as they did when words defeated him. We were closing in on bedtime, which didn’t help. I put my hand on his wild auburn mop. Her color—Aly’s.

“And what if we never heard a peep from out there? What would that say?”

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