Sunny had seen Maxon humiliated once, but she didn’t tell him, so he didn’t know. It was long after his father had died, but his brothers still treated him like a hired hand and his mother did nothing to stop them. Sometimes he had to fight them, and if he could get away, he did. Sometimes he had to do what they wanted. There were days when he didn’t answer Sunny’s summons, and she knew that he was either stuck doing some kind of chore, or AWOL, either way unavailable.
It was on one of these days that Sunny was out riding by herself. She was thirteen, the summer after Maxon’s first year in high school, when she was about to go to high school herself. It was August, hot, and the horseflies were bad. She let Pocket pick out his own way, after a canter down their dirt road. He went down the deer paths through the meadows where he could lean down and chew on comfrey and mint growing wild, unencumbered by a bit in his rebellious little mouth. When Sunny got too hot in the sun, and too irritated with his loud crunching and munching, she turned him toward home through the woods and urged him into a canter. Down the logging trail they flew, a welcome breeze in her hair and his mane, and the flies gone, replaced by swarms of gnats that they blew right through.
The light came down through the trees in filtered shafts, yellow on the ferns, and the trees moved over each other as she passed them in layers. Sunny heard a shout before she saw anyone out in the woods, and slowed her pony to a walk. She didn’t want to be seen, but she could see a little clump of people in the trees. They were shouting into a hole, and had not noticed her approach. Not knowing whether to turn around and run or go and see what they were doing, she let Pocket keep walking, his feet making soft thuds on the pressed dirt.
She saw that there were three young men standing around a pile of stones, and heard them shouting “NO!” down at a pile of rocks, and she heard a voice from inside the pile of rocks, pleading and crying, and then she knew that these were Maxon’s brothers, and the rocks were a well, and they had made him go down that well.
Country wells were inexact mechanisms and plumbing could become clogged by anything biological, or just a buildup of silt or rust. There were methods for cleaning wells that didn’t involve freezing a human being in cold mountain spring water, but for Maxon’s brothers, the downside of this method did not exist. They had to clean out the well, to get it working again, and they didn’t mind freezing Maxon to do it, so there was no problem. Now they were standing back from the well, being quiet and pretending to be gone. They stifled their laughter and poked each other in the arm. There was a rope hanging over the side, but it wasn’t tied to anything. He couldn’t pull himself out. Pulling on the rope would only pull it in on him.
Hearing him scream from in the well, Sunny’s heart froze. He could be dying. He could be losing whatever there was of his mind to lose. She felt her rage rising, her need to protect him. At least she could yell, “I’m here, Maxon! I’m here!,” and he would know that he wasn’t left in the well, legs braced against the sides, neck deep in the water. She knew that it hurt him to be down there in the cold. But she kept her mouth shut, her legs slack; her pony kept on plodding down the path. She knew that if she let them know she was there, it would be worse for him. The two of them could not overpower these three men. Later, he would learn to beat them. But now, they were an army.
Then they took the rope up, and began to pull him out. His head came up first, dark and wet, and then his body. He climbed out and stood there, dripping. The brothers were angry. The task had not been accomplished. As they conferred about what was to be done, motioning at Maxon as if he were a wrench or a drill, he stood shivering, his whole body shaking. Sunny could see them but not hear them, except for a few sounds that punched through like the bark of a laugh. Maxon was wearing nothing but boxers. She could see every bone in his body, his sharp clavicles, his jutting hip bones, the knobs on his back. It was so precious to her, that body, covered and uncovered by the trees as she passed them, his cold and dripping body. He clasped his arms around himself, rubbing up and down and trying to get warm. She was terribly and permanently moved. She never forgot it.
The brothers turned to him. They were finished discussing the matter, and they directed him sternly to get back into the well. He shook his head firmly, back and forth, ducked to run, but quickly one of them had him by the wrist. He let out a yelp, a sound like a wounded dog that turned Sunny’s blood to fire. Then “No!” he yelled. “No, no,” and “Please!”
She panted, her breath coming in gulps. She would call to him, “Maxon, run!,” and he would come straight to her, jump up on the back of her pony, and they would canter away to safety. She could save him, protect him, warm him, those wet bones pressing against her back as they fled, his cold arm clamped around her waist, hips banging against her, making the back of her shirt cold and wet. But she said nothing, did nothing, let the scene pass behind her, let the trees cover it, the noises of it slipping away into the birdsong and cicadas. Her pony was too small even for just her. With Maxon on board, too, it would be ridiculous, he probably wouldn’t even trot. Hers was no white stallion, she no crusader. The most she could do for him was to never speak of it, never let him know she had heard those cries, she had seen him brought so low, watched that wretched shivering in the woods, and felt for that cold body such a strange desire. Later, in the fall, she would hold him in her arms in the planetarium, and kiss him under the stars.
SUNNY WENT INTO HER house and shut the door. She locked it, doorknob and bolt. They would have to burn it open with a torch, pry it open with a pitchfork. They would have to crack her open like a nut. Inside the house, she dropped to her knees with another contraction and began to crawl toward the living room. She made it to the rug, so immaculately dyed and tied, a million knots per square inch. It had cost eighteen thousand dollars. As many knots as there are stars in the sky, said the salesman, a lively Moroccan. Bad analogy, Maxon had said. You’re looking for density, not quantity. Try rods and cones on the retina. That gives you both.
When Bubber was a baby she had laid a plastic mat over this rug, to protect it from stains. She kept pushing the mat down at the edges, then replaced it, and then she took the mat up and they abandoned this room altogether. It became the shrine, the holy crypt of urban respectability, a resting place for the crystal pieces she acquired, the Indian carvings, the silver. Cabinets ringed the walls, glass cases sparkling. A museum of only five years of history. This is unbearable, she thought. I can’t bear it.
She rocked on her hands and knees. She could feel the baby, and the baby was coming down. There was a turn, a big somersault in her stomach, and at that moment, she knew that the baby was about to come out. The baby was about to be born. In the darkness on the inside, everything was in the right place. There was no communication from outside to in, or inside to out. But there was a process in place inside the womb that no external timetable could hinder or accelerate. She dragged off her underpants, pulling them back, down, and kicking them to the side. The contractions were now coming one right after the next, rolling like particles, not like waves, bombarding her, turning her inside out.
She put her forehead on the rug and strained, and the straining finally gave her some relief. In the straining, she finally felt better. There was no one coming to help her. There was no backup plan. If she would be torn apart, then she would tear herself apart. There was a change in Sunny’s mind. A new sense of this-is-happening. She erased all contemplation, all reflection, until there was only Sunny herself, a raw and bleeding thing in a lemon yellow silk chiffon babydoll dress hiked up wet around her waist, dripping sweat, ass in the air, trying to explode.
In the pain and the inversion, with all her blood a hot bubble in her head, she finally knew. She was unfit, and she was bald. But she was the only mother that was here. In the dark, where all the muscles were, where the baby had turned herself around and kicked for home, there was no bald and no unfit. There was only a body with a baby in it, doing its best. I’m sorry, said the body to the baby. I’m bald. I’ve made terrible mistakes. Almost all of your grandparents are dead because of me. I’m going to embarrass you. I’m going to fuck things up. But I am your mother, and I will do my best. Whatever I actually am, and whatever I can actually do, I am the mother you have. Here I am. Doing it.
The contractions overtook her. She tried to climb the drapes. She wrapped her wrists in the soft fabric and lay back against them, rocking her body against the curtain rod, writhing and groaning. The curtains held, but her mind wavered. She slipped out of time, out of this painful anchor. Maybe it was an accumulation of everything that had happened, or maybe it was an experience common to every woman who labors alone. She did feel the pull of her hands on the drapes and the burning, heavy urgency between her legs. It made her push, push, right down from her throat to her thighs. But beside it, under it, and around it, she saw a purplish fog rise up over her eyes, and she began to see things that weren’t there: her baby, and the life she would have.
She saw a beautiful long-legged six-year-old with a face like a valentine, and bright ropes of orange hair flashing in the sun. Hair just like Bubber’s. She was carrying a bamboo stick, and expertly piloting a small sailboat around the pond at the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. The wind was brisk, spraying water from the fountain in a wide arc and whispering in the beech trees. The boats moved fast, some almost lying down sideways, about to capsize. But the red-haired girl put her stick right against the divot on the deck of her bright blue boat and gave it a big push away from the wall, her eyes intent on its progress. She does that really well, thought Sunny. She is an expert; she must do it all the time. My name is Emma, said the girl to a little boy standing next to her. Emma.
She saw a fierce, happy nine-year-old cantering on a chestnut pony across a meadow full of comfrey and mint. She had her hands buried in the pony’s mane and her bare heels dug into its sides, making it go faster. Her sunny hair was short now, cut off at her chin, bouncing in wavy layers. The girl was laughing, her knees pinned to the pony like a clamp, teeth bared. Sunny knew her breath was coming short. Sunny knew she had to push this baby out. Maybe it was the wind in her face, cantering across the meadow. Maybe it was everything in her body pushing on down. She whisked along the deer path, parallel to the tree line. Those were Maxon’s woods. Stay in the meadow, girl.
She saw the girl again, older, on a rocket to the moon. She was asleep in a bunk, her hands thrown back over her head and wrists knocking into the wall, her chin up, as if she were resisting some invisible restraint, some band across her belly, some wire in her head. She wore a white leotard with long sleeves, and Sunny could see it was just a little bit too short in the arms, a little bit too wide in the waist. She was covered by a thin, plastic sheet. Wake up, Sunny thought. Let me talk to you. Do you remember being born? Did it all come out all right in the end? At what moment did you know: I’m alive! This woman is my mother!
The girl grew up, she was twenty now, and she was leaving the family on the moon. They were all there: Sunny, Maxon, and Bubber, to say good-bye. Sunny wore a gray cardigan, pulled tight around her. She smiled and waved at the girl, while her tears fell down. Maxon and Bubber stood still as statues, right next to each other, exactly the same height. They wore space suits and rigid expressions. But the girl went over and kissed them both, hugged them, clamped her hand under Bubber’s armpit playfully to make him laugh. Sunny saw Bubber put his arm around his sister and pull her tight around the shoulders. Don’t go, she wanted to say to the girl. Bubber needs you. I need you.
She saw the girl on Earth, taking a human shape, living a human life, falling in love, making friends. She would visit the moon, but she would never really go back. She would be okay. They would all really miss her. Sunny would visit sometimes, but she could never ignore the distraction of the moon. She could always see it. It made her feel critical of her daughter. It made her feel rushed and anxious. She always went back, but the girl never did. Her place was on Earth. Sunny had known that this would happen. Come out, Emma, so I can have my time with you. I’m waiting for you, I’m going to help you get there. I’m going to be on your side. Whatever happens.
MAXON WAS NOT MOVED by the sight of the moon’s dusty surface. There was no desolation magnificent enough to distract him from unloading the robots and getting on with his work. He was moved, however, by the sight of the lava pipe, a huge chasm in the moon’s surface, on the back side of a newer crater. The pipe went down for miles, an old vent for a hypothesized prehistoric volcano, now just a tube riddled with caves and protected from meteors and the sun. They had landed so well, so perfectly close to the place they were supposed to land, that he had found the lava pipe almost immediately. He felt, in that moment, a surge of triumph. I’m right, he thought. I was right. Here it is. This is the difference between success and failure. The humans had landed. They would colonize the moon.
While Phillips and the rest walked around making footprints and repairs, Maxon took the cargo container down on a tether. Lowering the massive box full of mother robots in low gravity was a breeze. He could almost manage it on his own. He thought he might say, “You boys stay here and clean the shit out of your pants while I finish the mission,” but then he didn’t say it. Sometimes it’s better to say nothing.
Maxon didn’t think, Look, this hapless little biological sliver has redeemed itself. Look, it has survived. Look, the plaintive little push toward the cosmos has won us a foothold in the universe, a first footstep out. He didn’t think, Suck it, universe. We’re here, which is what Fred Phillips said he’d thought. He only thought about the latitude and longitude, and how it was exactly as he had imagined it. No more poignant, no less grand. Just exactly how it had looked in the plans; that’s how it was.
Maxon and the robots reached a cave that had been identified and mapped by ultrasound and chosen by geologists as the site for the future colony. Maxon maneuvered the cargo box into the spot where it was supposed to stop, stood beside it, and opened the main door. It was dark in the lava pipe. Dark and cold. He had a light, and a warm space suit. Did he remember being stuck down in a well, and crying to be let out? Did the lava pipe bring back memories of that fear? He did not, and it did not. Wells were not in his memory.
Did he remember being expelled from the womb, thrust from that dark pipe to another, through the years of misunderstandings, approximations, and nervous fixations? Did he feel the pressure of the lava pipe on his body, forcing him onward, downward, toward the completion of the mission? Did the baby in the womb understand the father in the lava pipe, setting up the robots, fixing the cameras, laboring for hours in the darkness? Or did she only know this: Now it’s time for us to come out.
At the time they had agreed upon, Phillips and Conrad pulled Maxon up from the pit on a rope. One of his thumbs was crushed, and he was hungry. Otherwise his arrangements on behalf of mankind in launching the robotic construction of a lunar colony had been a complete success. The robots chugged and whirred on below the surface, mining their materials, creating their children, teaching them to walk, move, mine, create children of their own. For ten years, the world would watch on cameras as the colony took shape. In twelve years Maxon would come back with his son Bubber, freshly graduated from MIT, and open the airlock. Everything just as he had left it to be.
SUNNY HELD HER BABY and wiped the blood from her face. They lay together on the rug. The baby was on Sunny’s chest, and Sunny’s back was on the ground. Every breath felt like a miracle, pain free. There was no cry, no knife, no scale, no iodine. Pressed up against her mother’s heart, wrapped in a red silk scarf from the hat rack, the baby lay blinking. Sunny’s relief was so intense that she felt she might be able to go to sleep right there, but she knew that while they were getting cold, the neighborhood was in a hot panic. She could hear the ambulance outside, and lots of voices. She didn’t want Bubber to be alarmed, coming home with the nanny from the pool. She pushed herself, still sitting, to the door, scooting herself carefully along so as not to disturb the little bundle. At the door she reached up, flipped the bolt, and turned the handle. Right there were Rache and Jenny, standing on the step. It was as if they were waiting, ready to come in and have sandwiches or drink margaritas. They were just waiting, each with one foot on the stoop.
“Look,” said Sunny, and she pulled the scarf back to show the baby’s face. “She’s here.”
“Sunny,” said the women. Those friends of hers said, “Sunny, she’s amazing. And she looks just like you.”