Across the Universe

37 AMY

MY HEART THUDS AS HARLEY AND I FOLLOW ELDER PAST the rows of little metal doors to a wall lined with lockers.

I never packed anything for this. Mom and Daddy never told me that I could take anything with me.

Elder pulls open a locker; a stack of ten suitcase-size trunks lines the inside.

“Here you are,” he says, pulling out three trunks.

Harley and Elder stand over me as I push the button on the first trunk. The lid opens with an audible pop — the airlock preservation seal breaks.

This one must be Mom’s trunk. Her perfume wafts up as soon as the lid opens. I breathe deeply, eyes closed, remembering how her clothes smelled of this same perfume when I played dress up so many years ago. I breathe again and realize that all I can smell is the bitter preservation gas they must have filled the trunk with, and Mom’s perfume is nothing but memory.

I pick up the clear preservation bag filled with pictures.

“What’s that?” Harley asks.

“The ocean.”

He stares at it, open-mouthed.

“And that?” Elder asks.

“This was our family trip to the Grand Canyon.”

Elder takes the picture I hand to him. He traces the stone carved by the Colorado River with his finger. He looks incredulous, as if he doesn’t quite believe that the canyon behind my parents and me is real.

“This is all water?” Harley asks, pointing at the picture of me making a sand castle on the beach when I was seven.

I laugh. “All water! It’s salty, which is gross, but the waves are always going up and down, in and out. My daddy and I used to jump in the waves, see how far out we could go, and then ride them back to the shoreline.”

“All water,” Harley mutters. “All water.”

The other pictures aren’t as exciting. They are mostly of me. Me as a baby. Me as a toddler, in my grandparents’ garden, among the pumpkin vines. First day of school. Me at prom in my black slinky dress, standing next to Jason, accepting his cornflower corsage.

I root around deeper in the trunk. There’s something I know Mom wouldn’t have left on Earth. When my fingers close on something small and hard, my heart gives a little lurch. I withdraw the round-topped velvet box from the trunk and hold it in my palm.

“What’s that?” Elder asks. Harley is still staring at the ocean.

Inside the box is a gold cross necklace. My grandmother’s cross.

Elder laughs. “Don’t tell me you’re one of the ones who believed in those fairy tales!”

His laugh dies as I put the cross around my neck, never once breaking eye contact with him. “This ship is named Godspeed,” I say, adjusting the cross to lie at the center of my chest.

“Godspeed just means luck.”

I turn from Elder, stare out at the frozen morgue doors. “It means more than that.”

I swallow and put the pictures back into the trunk. Except for the one of my family and me at the Grand Canyon.

The cross swings forward as I reach for Daddy’s trunk. It’s filled with mostly books. Some I recognize: the complete works of Shakespeare, Pilgrim’s Progress, the Bible, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Ten or twelve books on military tactics, survival, and science. Three books filled with blank paper and a pack of unopened mechanical pencils. I set one notebook and three pencils aside.

I hesitate, then reach back in the trunk for Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. I’ve never read the book, but I’m judging by the title that it’ll give me some pointers on what to do with whoever’s unplugging people. I tuck it away under the notebook, hoping Elder didn’t notice the title. Somehow, some way, I’m sure his mentor Eldest is at the bottom of all this, and I’m afraid that if it comes down to it, I might have to wage a war against him all by myself.

And then I see it.

My teddy bear.

I lift her up. The big green bow at her neck is lopsided and the felt is worn off her nose. The fur on her right paw is almost gone, because when I was a baby, I used to suck on it instead of my thumb.

I hug Amber to my chest, longing for something I know felt and stuffing can’t give.

“Last trunk,” Elder says, pushing it toward me as I close Daddy’s trunk.

I take a deep breath. I squeeze Amber.

But that trunk is empty.

“Where’s your stuff?” Harley asks, leaning over my shoulder.

Tears prick my eyes.

“Daddy didn’t think I was going to go,” I said. “He didn’t pack anything for me, because he didn’t think I was really going with them.”