MARTians Read online

  I am reading the book Ms. Brody gave me. It is a story about a brave spaceman who has traveled by rocket ship to Mars. That’s who is knocking on the door, the spaceman. The pages are brittle and brownish. It was written so long ago that people thought people might use a rocket to fly to Mars, knock on a door, and expect an answer.

  Talk about rude. The guy shows up uninvited, acts all-important, and calls the woman inside a Martian even though that word means nothing to her; it isn’t what she calls herself. After the woman slams the door in his face, he starts knocking again. I can hear him knocking. Really, I can. Someone is knocking on my front door.

  AnnaMom would not need to knock. She knows the combination to the door. The real estate agent would not need to knock either. She knows the combination too. She can get in here whenever she wants — that’s why it’s important for the house to be show-ready every second. It is hard, though, to imagine anyone who would want to see the house now. Houses show better in the morning light. All the drapes and blinds should be open and strategic lamps should be on . . . that’s what sells, sells, sells. But now it is dark and I’ve closed the blinds and I have only one lamp on to spill a puddle of light on the page I’m reading.

  “Whoever was knocking at the door didn’t want to stop.” I read the sentence again, and the knocking goes on, PLUNK PLUNK PLUNK . . . PLUNK PLUNK PLUNK . . . I pull my towel around me tighter and go to stand by the door. I peek at the security vid display. It is too dark out there to see. If I switch the porch light on, whoever is there will know . . . what? I don’t know, but it frightens me, the thought of them, whoever they are, knowing.

  “Hey, you, it’s me!” says a voice on the other side of the door.

  That clears things up. That means nothing. That could be said by anyone to anyone. It could be said by a coyote to a cat, by a spaceman to a Martian, by . . .

  “Hey, do you got water? I need a shower. The water’s gone at my house. I see you got electric, so, if you got water, can I, please?”

  “Mort?”

  “Yeah, it’s me, Timmer.”

  I turn and push the buttons on the alarm system and open the locks, one, two, three, then I pull my towel around me tighter once more before I open the door.

  “Hello, Mort.”

  “Hello, Last Girl. Hey, you do got water, I guess, because look at you, in a towel — and your hair still wet.”

  “I have water. And you can come in for a shower, because, thank you for the ride.” And then he steps in the door, and when it shuts, I’m not alone anymore. Although I’m not sure this is better.

  “I’ll show you the shower,” I say, and I lead the way upstairs. Then I go into my room, lock the door, and get dressed. I should have done that sooner. If I had, I could have given him this towel, the old adventure towel, and it would have had the new adventure of wiping water off the skin of a new and different body. That’s not going to happen. He’s going to grab one of the perfect prop towels to dry off. It will never be the same after that. It will never be so plush and full of promise. It will never be a virgin towel again.

  I wonder if the smart thing to do is to stay in my room with the door locked. It seems a little safer, but the door is just a hollow shell of wood around some air, and the lock, well, it’s enough to keep someone out if they want to respect your privacy, but it isn’t meant for security. It is the sort of security that only exists when you are already secure.

  I go downstairs. AnnaMom’s shoes are still where I kicked them off my sore feet. I walk over and pick them up. I should put them away, out of sight. Who is going to see them? Me? MORTimmer when he finishes his shower? The imaginary family looking for the perfect home? I carry the shoes with me into the kitchen, open the trash bin, and drop them into the bottom.

  I open the fridge and stare at the takeaway containers. AnnaMom planned ahead when she got so much. Even though she isn’t here, she is still feeding me, making certain that I eat — at least until the leftovers run out.

  “Thanks.” He’s standing in the kitchen doorway. His polo shirt is wet, and water is dripping from his hair onto his shoulders.

  “I have food,” I say. “There’s enough if you want some.”

  “I ate at work,” he says.

  “So you’re not hungry?”

  “Didn’t say that. Thank you, yes, if you have more than you need.”

  “It’s just leftovers.” I pull the containers out of the fridge and notice there is a little bottle of plum wine in there too. I’m not sure why we didn’t drink that last night. Maybe if we had shared plum wine it would have felt less like the end of the world.

  I divide the food between two plates and warm them, one at a time, in the microwave. Then I carry mine in to sit on the couch. It’s not really a thing we do anymore, eating on the couch, but the way we do things doesn’t seem to matter much anymore, now that AnnaMom is gone, now that there isn’t a we.

  Now there is only me, Zoë, and this other person, MORTimmer, sitting on a couch with plates balanced on our knees.

  “What’s that?” he asks, pointing with his chopsticks at the book hovering on the nearly invisible table.

  “It’s a graduation present from my homeroom technician.”

  “Nobody gave me anything,” he says.

  He leans forward and puts his plate on the table. Then he picks up the book and ruffles the pages slowly. He turns to the beginning of the first story and says, “It’s about history, huh? Way back in 1999?”

  “I don’t think so. I think when they made it, 1999 was far in the future. They thought we were going to go to Mars.”

  “‘When the town people found the rocket at sunset they wondered what it was. Nobody knew, so it was sold to a junkman and hauled off to be broken up for scrap metal,’” reads MORTimmer. “The future — or past or whatever it is — it sounds like now.” He sets the book back on the table.

  “There is no light at my house, you know; the electric, it’s gone.”

  “How long before that happens?” I ask. “How long before they shut off the power when you don’t pay the bill?”

  “A month, two, but that doesn’t matter. I can show you how to hook it back up, or I can do it for you.”

  “Well, why don’t you just hook yours back up?”

  “Because it’s gone. Somebody came and stripped the wires out of the walls. They took some of the plumbing too. You know, to sell. So, no water and no electric. It’s pretty much that way in all these houses now.”

  “They steal wires?”

  “Yes.”

  “And they will steal that way from my house?”

  “After a while. I think they wait until nobody is home most of the time.”

  “Who would buy a house that had been ruined like that?”

  “The same people who wanted the houses here before they were ruined: nobody. Nobody is going to live in these houses ever again. When you give up and move on, it’s over. Actually, it doesn’t matter if you give up or not. It’s over. Last Girl, you are the last person in the last living house in Terra Incognita.”

  “This is good,” says MORTimmer. “I get tired of eating nothing but cereal and the food from the AllMART Eateria. It tastes the same every time, you know? So, yeah, there’s variety to choose from, but it never changes. When my Grammalita made soup, it was different every time. Sometimes it was okay, sometimes it was the best soup ever, but it was always a surprise. There are no surprises at the Eateria. Every burrito is exactly like every other burrito. That’s the AllMART way.”

  “My mom never made soup. She was too tired after work for cooking. And there were only the two of us.”

  “There were seven of us.”

  “Big family.”

  “Not anymore. My family is the same size as yours, now. Only one.”

  I think my family is still two of us, even if AnnaMom isn’t here. She is . . . somewhere. She exists.

  His plate is clean.

  “I’ll take that,” I say. When I get to the k
itchen, I think I’m going to scrape the plates and put them in the dishwasher, but I don’t. I just drop them into the garbage on top of the shoes.

  “You figure things out fast.” MORTimmer has followed me.

  “Do you want some plum wine? It’s cold.”

  “Is it good?”

  “I think it’s good.”

  “I’ll trust you.”

  One of the kitchen lights is focused on the wineglasses hanging from slender stems. When the imaginary family sees them, they will be enchanted by their party sparkle. I open the little bottle and pour it into two glasses so we each have half.

  When I hand his glass to him, he holds it out in an expectant way, so I clink my rim against his. I think we are supposed to say something too, but what?

  “I’m glad you trusted me,” says MORTimmer. “I’m glad you aren’t still sitting in that bus shelter. I was worried about you. It’s hard, I know, at first. I’m glad you let me help you.”

  I’m not sure I trust him. I got in his car. I opened my front door when I was dressed in nothing but my adventure towel. Those things are true, but those things are not equal to trust.

  Soon, the plum wine is gone. I hold out my hand and MORTimmer surrenders his empty glass. Then I throw both glasses, hard, into the sink, where they shatter into an entirely new sort of sparkle party under the lights. I take down two more glasses and throw them too. Very pretty. Very satisfying.

  “I need to go now,” says MORTimmer. “Graveyard shift.”

  I follow him to the door, tap on the security pad. 1-2-2-6 A-2-Z, Anna to Zoë.

  “I’ll come back in the morning,” he says. “They might call you tomorrow about the job, but if they don’t, don’t worry. They might take until Monday.” Then he walks away across the cul-de-sac to his car where it is parked in front of the bone-white house where he lived with his big family, even a grandmother who made soup. I never noticed when they were there. Now they are gone. There is nothing to see. I shut the door. I pick up my dead butterfly of a book.

  The daylilies that bloomed today are wadding themselves into little damp wads. The ones that want to bloom tomorrow are waiting for the sun.

  I climb the stairs, and while I do, I imagine hard as I can that this is just a night when AnnaMom needs to work late. She called. Yes, she called like she always called, to tell me Just go to bed, Zoë, baby. I’ll be there in the morning. But I can’t quite remember it enough to believe it. You know I love you, Zoëkins, whispers imaginary AnnaMom.

  “How much do you love me, AnnaMom?”

  I love you 37 pink socks and a bowl of cereal. I love you 12 stair steps, 9 long months plus 15 years, 5 months, and 25 days, whispers imaginary AnnaMom. Her math is exactly right. That was how much she loved me.

  I stand beside my bedroom window and look out. What I see is dark. There are no lights in the windows of the houses of Terra Incognita. Even the streetlights have gone dark because there is no one on the street to pay to keep them shining.

  In the canyon between my house and the house next door, dark shapes are moving through the shadows. Animals. Not pets. There aren’t any pets in Terra Incognita anymore. There used to be. But then the time for moving came, and pets were a complication. So the animals got left behind. Maybe it was supposed to be temporary, but it wasn’t. The ones that waited died, and the ones that lived went wild. Cats did better than dogs. There were dogs next door, which barked for a while in the garage and then, I guess, died. AnnaMom said it was wrong to leave those animals behind. She tried calling to get animal police to come and collect them, but we didn’t have the extra money. I thought maybe we should just open the garage door, but AnnaMom said we couldn’t take the chance. Those were guard dogs trained to bite, maybe. And now they were hungry. We couldn’t take the chance. We just had to wait. It only took a few days, and then the barking stopped.

  Far away, over the horizon, there is a glow of lights from the parking lots of AllMART. There are still people there. But here? I am the last girl in the last living house. I am Zoë Zindleman. I’m used to being the last one. It gives me time to think, but right now, I don’t know what to think, so I pick up the book and start reading again.

  On imaginary Mars, butterflies made of fire drink nectar from crystal blossoms. Here in the last living house in Terra Incognita, there are broken wineglasses in the sink.

  “I said I would come back,” he says when I open the door.

  That’s true. He did, but I never said I wanted that.

  “Graveyard shift ends at seven, and then I stopped by the Warren and made sure everything was cool for you moving in. I thought you’d be up by now.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “When you start work, you can’t live here anymore. You need to move, so you should live with me, us, in the Warren.”

  “This is my house.”

  “It is for another few weeks.”

  “You still live here.” I point to the white house across the cul-de-sac.

  “I don’t live here. I come back here sometimes. And now that the water is gone, it’s not worth the trip. If I start double-shifting, it won’t even be possible. I mean, the commute — when would I sleep?”

  “What if I don’t get a job? What then?”

  “You have two work referrals. You have twice as much chance of being hired as most people. The only people with a clearer sense of future employment than you are wearing prison tattoos. If Tuesday rolls around and you haven’t got a job — that isn’t going to happen. What is going to happen is I’m going upstairs to sleep, and you are going to start packing up what you need, because the phone is going to ring, and then you will be moving to the Warren, which is conveniently located so close to both AllMART and Q-MART that we never hafta turn the lights on — the parking lot security lights keep it bright as day all night long. I’m going to shower. I brought you a jelly doughnut.” He hands me a bag and starts up the stairs like they are his stairs and this is his house. He does that while I stand there holding a bag full of squished jelly doughnuts, red smears and flattened buns.

  After our last dinner together, AnnaMom packed her things while I watched.

  “I wish we had some of the family stuff,” said AnnaMom. That stuff is all packed away. While she was staging our house, Jyll took all that stuff — my baby pictures, our refrigerator magnets, the collection of hard-to-find ostrich-related art — and locked it away in her unit at SecurIt Safe-Keeping Storage. Jyll said she understood the sentimental value of those things, but they couldn’t be in the house. People want to imagine their own happy future, and it’s too much trouble for them to go through the thought process of replacing my toothless smile with whatever they think is cute. Jyll never did understand, exactly, the ostrich thing, even though we tried to explain. She thought it was some sort of morbid memorial or we were members of an ostrich cult.

  “Look,” said Jyll, “I don’t let people keep crucifixes on the wall or carvings of Kali on the mantel. No ostriches. I don’t care if they are good luck. You don’t need luck to sell this house; you need me.”

  Jyll might have been wrong about that.

  Right or wrong, all the family stuff is locked away in storage, which made AnnaMom’s packing more efficient. All she packed were her work clothes and personal items. While she zipped toiletries into little cases and tucked shoes snugly into a suitcase, she said, “You can use our stuff when you set up your first apartment. And the money from when the house sells, that all goes to you after the sales commission. It will be your nest egg.”

  In her head, I think AnnaMom was imagining a nest egg laid by an ostrich. The nest egg I really have is something about the size of a human egg, which, as I learned in Sexual Responsibility class, is so small you can fit 200,000 of them into an olive.

  “You should be packing,” he says when he comes back downstairs. I am still standing by the door with the bag of doughnuts. How long have I been standing here? How long does it take a boy to shower? He
rubs his wet hair with a virgin towel and says, “I can help you if you have a lot.”

  A lot? Do I have a lot? I don’t know if I have a lot.

  “Do you got boxes?”

  “In the garage. For when we move . . .”

  “This is then. This is when you move. But we should eat first,” and he takes the paper bag gently out of my custody. “Do you have coffee? I woulda brought some, but it woulda got cold, you know? Coffee?”

  “Coffee?”

  “Coffee,” he says again, like he’s talking to a goldfish. Then he walks into the kitchen. I swim along after, through the arches of my goldfish castle, from one part of my bowl to another.

  We do have coffee, in wonderful tiny capsules that keep it fresh until the coffee machine jaws bite down and inject boiling water through hollow metal fangs and the coffee drips dripsdrips drips down, smelling like hazelnut and butterscotch and whatever it is that coffee, plain coffee, smells like.

  In the almost-a-minute it takes to make coffee, I say, “The packing. What do I need?”

  “We got you mostly covered at the Warren, but some clothes for when you aren’t at work, personal stuff, bring that. Personal stuff. And you should bring your own bowl and spoon. That way there won’t be arguments about dirty dishes so much.”

  I open the cupboard where the bowls live, stacked into beautiful little pagodas. In front of them there is a little row of chopstick holders: little bunnies, little kitties, little fish, all curling just so, just right, just perfect. We never used them to hold our chopsticks. We just had them because they are kawaii — so cute. I shut the cupboard and open the drawer where we keep the plastic dishes. There, at the back, is a plastic bowl with a row of pink bunnies running along the rim. At the bottom of the bowl is a full moon, smiling up at me, smiling up at the bunnies. I’ve seen those bunnies, that moon, so many times. How much do you love me, AnnaMom? I love you a pink bunny bowl, and a pink kitty comb, and a little silver spoon just the right size for your little baby mouth.

  I open the silverware drawer and look through all the sections, but the little silver spoon isn’t there. Maybe AnnaMom packed it away in a gray plastic bin and Jyll took it away to Safe-Keeping Storage. Is that what happened to my spoon, AnnaMom? It doesn’t matter if a mean girl broke your kitty comb, Zoëkins. She didn’t break your heart. I know. I know she didn’t break your heart. I know because I keep it in my own heart.