Sprite
One spring morning, I went over to Amethyst’s with my husband for lunch. She told me not to bring Sprite and so I didn’t, but once the hor d’ourves were distributed, the first thing out of my mouth was what Sprite had told me earlier that day.
“He said he wanted to come along, and then he said — what was it, Timon?”
“‘Give my family a chance to improve.’”
“Yeah, that was it.”
Amethyst looked at me like I’d shot her mother, but I didn’t care because I knew I’d gotten to her.
Timon and I had gone on one of those thrilling speed boat rides around the harbor earlier with the space crew, weaving and dodging in and out of the water-skiers and the jet-skiers and skimming the rocks and the shores, and tearing along the beaches. Jerry, the leader of the research team, was at the wheel. Jerry was a feisty, fit, bald dude in his late forties. Beforehand, we’d gone on a trial run for the space mission.
After the tests in the freezing chamber, we sat on the boat and were shooting the shit when all of a sudden Jerry started to sing Billy Joel’s “The Longest Time”, which is one of those songs, like “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Come Sail Away”, where if one person starts to sing it everyone has to join in. So we all sang the whole thing together. Then Jerry went on this huge schpiel about how if humanity ever loses its curiosity and drive for knowledge that’ll be the end of the species. A very special moment.
After the ride, where I got really wet from the spray and shrieked like a girl several times due to Jerry’s reckless driving, we de-boarded right on the dock.
“I see why Kotek is driving the shuttle and not you,” I said to him as we all got off. Jerry laughed and gave me the finger.
Timon kissed me when I stepped off the boat and I could tell, a bunch of the single people, including Argyle and Kotek, were jealous of our relationship, but they’re good guys so they’d be fine. They just didn’t know it yet.
I should explain: they found a new planet that’s half covered in ice and not too far away by warp speed standards. The planet is Earth-sized and covered in fresh water. Half of the stuff is frozen, just caked onto almost exactly 50 per cent of the place, most of it in glaciers that stretch all the way to the sky, and it’s always night there because the planet doesn’t rotate. From a distance, the planet looks like a dark blue sphere that’s half covered in about two inches of vanilla ice cream. So the World Government is sending an international team of scientists, astronauts, and journalists on a two-decade mission to bring back as much of the water as we can possibly manage. The tanks we’ll be towing through the void are the size of the Great Lakes. Due to the surface temperature of the planet, we’ll have two minutes at a time to do water runs but since there’s some space-time continuum thing, the two minutes is actually a couple of hours. I don’t know much about it — I leave that up to the scientists and the engineers. Timon and I will be in orbit the whole time, documenting and sending Tweet updates back to earth in real time.
Timon and I went on our first trial run in the freezing tank earlier today. The astronauts kept asking us to stay in the tank but we were all claustrophobic from our suits and helmets and I’d had enough after half an hour. It was only obligatory because the higher-ups wanted to say we’d trained for it. As I said, I’m staying in orbit.
My feet have been peeling really bad from being stuck inside the space suit all day, and I was picking these huge, painless, egg-sized flaps of skin off my toes and soles as I listened to Wade Gibson give a report on NPR about the new Rocko’s Modern Life movie, which is apparently about Ikea and North Korea. I’d just picked Sprite up from day school.
Sprite was listening to Wade with me. He likes Rocko, too. I get a real kick out of watching my son appreciate something that I appreciated over twenty years ago, and my dad appreciated twenty years before that. He watches TV on the little ancient antennae unit that’s sitting on the kitchen counter. He likes watching that TV more than his iPad because it “has character.” Can you believe that? 4 years old. They say humans are getting smarter with every generation but if Sprite’s any indication then this next batch of kids is going to be a quantum leap.
Amethyst doesn’t want Sprite and he’s more than aware of it, but you’ve never seen a four-year-old more calm about a thing like that. He’s like a little Buddhist monk or something. He just insists himself on her, calmly. Just walks right into her place and sits there like a plant. If she doesn’t want to talk to him, she doesn’t have to. But she always does.
So I brought him along to lunch even though Amethyst told me to leave him with a sitter. I left him in the car with the windows down and told him to give me two minutes. He nodded down at his iPad and gave me a thumbs up.
“How’s the space mission?” Amethyst’s dad says, smiling at me when Timon and I walk in. “You guys gonna like it?”
“Yeah,” I say. I can tell he’s uncomfortable but I judge people on their intentions, and Amethyst’s parents just want to be liked so bad.
Amethyst’s apartment is so small, it’s like a closet to me, and Timon and I sit at this breakfast bar thing while Amethyst and her boyfriend take a seat not two feet away in these easy chairs while her parents sit on the fireplace mantel. Everyone gets their plates of snacky lunch items and Amethyst starts talking about her plans for the next school year and how she’ll be done with her degree next fall if she gets into the right classes.
I watch her and chew celery and think about Sprite out in the car. I try not to be too angry. She’s taking her son for the weekend whether she likes it or not, dammit. I know she won’t hurt him — she just needs persuasion. And guilt-tripping. Despite it all, Amethyst isn’t a bad person, just a girl who was told she was the center of the universe like the rest of us. She found out she had to finally grow up and it scared the shit out of her.
I don’t know why she insists on her ex-fiance being there for these get-togethers with her dad and his wife. I think maybe she still wants to show me off a bit.
If it hadn’t been for Sprite, Amethyst and I probably would’ve gotten married. But he came, with the pregnancy tests revealing their results one foggy day in March, and Amethyst wanted to have him. Then seven months later she did, and she changed.
It only takes that one line about what Sprite said to me earlier and Amethyst agrees to take him, with a sour look on her face, of course, and so I send him a text and not ten seconds later he’s at the door. I think he might’ve been waiting on the porch. But he just barges right in and parks his keister right in the middle of the carpet and starts playing on his iPad. Get used to it, mom, he says without speaking a word.
I’m really proud of him. He’s got to stay with her while Timon and I are on the trip. We’ll be gone until he’s almost twenty-five, so he’s pretty smart about the whole ordeal. He didn’t even cry when I told him we had to leave.
“Mom likes me,” he said. “She just needs to get to know me.”
(Sprite’s real name is Steven by the way, but he said Steven is too common a name so he chose Sprite for himself. Whatever, I like some individuality in a kid, so everyone calls him that now.)
Amethyst and her new man, some watery-eyed weasel whose name I can’t even remember and who sits in the corner next to Amethyst and crunches crackers and cheese, look at Sprite like a squirrel that’s just wandered in from the yard.
Amethyst is the most complicated moral conundrum I’ve ever encountered. She got engaged (she proposed!) to a guy knowing he was bisexual and got pregnant and had a child by him, even as the relationship was cooling off, and I had just met Timon at work and knew right away that he was the person I was going to be spending the rest of my life with. Then she was adamant about sticking it out for the whole pregnancy and then as soon as the baby slid out of her, she ended the relationship and pawned him off on me and my new boyfriend while she decided to go back to school to become — get this — an elementary school counselor.
Timon and I finish our plates and we leave Sprite on the floor. He’ll stay here for the rest of the weekend and then we’ll come get him. We don’t leave on the trip for another four months, so Amethyst will get to finish most of her semester before she becomes a full-time mom.
Amethyst is curt with me as we get up to leave but I can tell she’s accepted it. As Timon and I walk out the door, she gets up from her chair and sits next to Sprite on the floor. It’s reassuring.
