Gwendy’s Final Task

38

THE ZOOM MEETING WITH the University of Maine faculty and staff goes well. Gwendy experiences one minor hiccup—when speaking with the Director of Athletics, she accidentally refers to the Black Bears men’s basketball team as the Blueberries—but she catches herself right away and makes a joke of it. Everyone enjoys a laugh and she quickly moves on to other topics.

The rest of her afternoon is spent writing a blog entry for the National Geographic Society (complete with a couple of Dave Graves’s photos) and video conferencing with the Vice President about climate control issues. She has always found the man well-meaning but stupid … which pretty well describes Gwendy herself these days, unfortunately. In between these chores, she catches up on emails and practices tying her shoes (murmuring the bunny song as she does). At some point, she closes her eyes and tries reaching out to Gareth Winston, but nothing comes back to her. Not even the subtlest vibrations confirming his presence on the space station. Another chocolate animal might help, but it also might be a very bad idea.

At one point, Gwendy finds herself looking out the big main window with no idea how she got there. Or when.

NG, she thinks.

At dinner, Winston sits about as far away from Gwendy as is possible. Wonder why, she thinks with a satisfied smirk. For dessert, Sam Drinkwater surprises the crew with a pan of homemade chocolate brownies, still warm from the oven. Gwendy eats two, including a crunchy corner piece, her favorite ever since she was a young girl. They’re certainly not the button box’s special chocolates—for starters, they taste nothing alike, and for finishers they possess not even a hint of magic—but the brownies are delicious just the same. A cozy and much-needed reminder of home and simpler times.

After dinner, Gwendy stops by the weather deck. Her work is done for the day, but she’s not quite tired enough to call it a night. She also doesn’t want to return to her room just yet. Ever since the upsetting incident involving her running shoes, the button box’s voice has grown louder and more insistent and more difficult to push away. She’s hoping that staring into the enormous telescope for ten or fifteen minutes will be just the ticket for her beleaguered brain. But that’s not the only reason she likes coming here.

In some ways the Many Flags weather deck—with its own gigantic window like a hanging glass ornament, and its softly humming monitors—reminds Gwendy of Our Lady of Serene Waters Catholic Church back in Castle Rock. She finds the atmosphere calming for both the body and the soul, and it provides her a sort of celestial cathedral in which to reflect. And the view is—no pun, just truth—downright heavenly.

All of this is a miracle, she thinks, staring out at the dark expanse of … everything. How many other worlds exist in this endless sea of stars and planets and galaxies? How many other life forms might be staring back at me right at this very moment?

She remembers a warm July night when she was eleven—the summer before the button box first entered her life. A month earlier, just before the end of the school year, Gwendy’s fifth grade science teacher, Mr. Loggins—who more often than not taught his daily lessons with a big green crusty booger visible in one or both nostrils—had taken the class on a field trip to the planetarium. Most of the kids, already snared in summer vacation’s web of promise, spent those ninety minutes in the dark throwing jelly beans at their friends, gossiping about who was and who wasn’t invited to Katy Sharrett’s end-of-year pool party, and making fart sounds by stuffing their hands into their armpits.

Not Gwendy. She had been fascinated. When she got home from school later that afternoon, she’d immediately begged her parents to buy her a telescope. After intense negotiations involving her weekend chore duties, Mr. and Mrs. Peterson agreed to share the cost with their daughter (75% mom and dad, 25% Gwendy). On the first Saturday afternoon of summer break, Gwendy and her father drove out to the Sears store on Route 119 in Lewiston and picked up a Galaxy 313 StarFinder at thirty percent off the ticketed price. Gwendy was ecstatic.

On the July night she’s thinking about, the telescope was set up in the corner of the backyard, just a few paces away from the picnic table and grill. Her father, who had come outside earlier, was snoring in a lawn chair, a couple of empty cans of Black Label lying beside him in the freshly cut grass. After awhile, her mother appeared and tucked the fuzzy red blanket from the den sofa over him. Then she joined her daughter by the telescope.

“Take a look, mom,” Gwendy said, stepping aside.

Mrs. Peterson peered into the eyepiece. What she saw—a twisting band of shimmering stars as brilliant and bright as rare diamonds—stole her breath.

“It’s the constellation Scorpius,” Gwendy explained. “Made up of four different star clusters.”

“It’s beautiful, Gwendy.”

“Some nights, when it’s clear enough, you can see a huge red star right there in the middle. It’s called Antares.”

Fireflies danced in the darkness around them. Somewhere down the street a dog began barking.

“It’s like looking through a window at heaven,” Mrs. Peterson said.

“Do you …” All of a sudden Gwendy’s tone was unsure. “Do you really think there’s …”

Mrs. Peterson stepped away from the telescope and looked at her daughter, who was no longer staring up at the night sky. “Do I think what, honey?”

“Do you really think there’s a heaven?”

Mrs. Peterson was instantly struck with such an overpowering swell of love for her daughter that it made her heart ache. “Are you thinking about Grandma Helen right now?” Mrs. Peterson’s mother had passed away earlier in the spring as a result of complications from early onset diabetes. She was only sixty-one. The entire family had taken it hard, especially Gwendy. It had been her first intimate experience with death.

Gwendy didn’t answer.

“You want to know what I believe?”

She slowly raised her eyes. “Yes.”

Mrs. Peterson glanced over at her husband. He had rolled onto his side with his back to them and was no longer snoring. The blanket had fallen into the grass. When she looked back at her daughter standing there in the dark, Mrs. Peterson was shocked at how small and fragile the eleven-year-old looked.

“First of all, I want you to pay special attention to exactly what I just said. I asked if you wanted to know what I believed, right? I didn’t ask if you wanted to know what I thought. There’s a difference between the two. Does that make sense?”

“I think so.”

“Thinking something is more often than not about logical or intellectual deduction. And that’s a good thing. Like the things they teach you about at school. Proper thinking leads to learning and learning leads to knowledge. That’s why you know so much about so many interesting things like the scorpion constellation.”

“Scorpius.”

“Exactly,” Mrs. Peterson said, ruffling Gwendy’s hair. “But believing … now that’s something different. Something much more … personal.”

“You mean like Olive Kepnes believing in the Loch Ness Monster and aliens? Those are personal choices for her?”

“That’s one way to look at it. But I was thinking of God. The Bible tells us that He’s real, there are hundreds of stories about Him, but we’ve never seen Him with our own eyes, right? And no one we know—no one who’s even alive right now—has ever seen Him either. Right?”

“Right.”

“But many of us still choose to believe that He exists. And that kind of belief, the kind that comes from deep within your heart and soul, the kind that may at times even appear to defy common logic, is faith.”

“We learned about faith a long time ago in Sunday school.”

“Well, there you go. I have faith that there’s a God watching over all He’s created, and I have faith that there’s a wonderful place waiting all those who choose to live a good life. I don’t know what heaven looks like or where it is or even if it’s an actual physical place. In fact, I kind of have my doubts about the whole angels wearing white robes floating around on clouds playing harps scenario.”

Gwendy giggled, and Mrs. Peterson felt that ache in her heart again. It wasn’t a bad ache.

“But yes, I believe heaven exists and Grandma Helen is there right now.”

“But why do you believe those things?”

“Look around us, Gwendy. Tell me what you see.”

She looked to her left and then her right, and then up at the sky. “I see houses and trees and stars and the moon.”

“And what do you hear?”

She cocked her head to the side. “A train whistle … the Robinsons’ German Shepard barking … a car with a bad muffler.”

“What else? Listen closely this time.”

She cocked her head again, to the opposite side this time, and Mrs. Peterson lifted a hand to her face to cover a smile. “I hear the wind blowing through the treetops. And an owl hoot-hooting!”

Mrs. Peterson laughed. “Now tell me quick, what’s your favorite memory of Grandma Helen?”

“Her Christmas cookies,” Gwendy answered right away. “And her stories! I loved her bedtime stories when I was little!”

“Me too,” Mrs. Peterson said. “Now take a look through your telescope again.”

She did.

“All of those things you just answered—and so much more; my gosh, so much more, dear girl; think of your Grandpa Charlie and your best friend Olive; think of those amazing star clusters of yours; and before you go to sleep tonight, take a good long look at yourself in the mirror—those are the reasons why I believe. Do you think all those miracles could exist without a God? I don’t. And do you think—”

Before she could finish, a shooting star raced across the night sky. They stared at it with breathless wonder until it eventually flared out and disappeared. Mrs. Peterson wrapped her arms around her daughter and pulled her close. When she spoke again it was barely a whisper, and Gwendy realized that her mother was either crying or close.

“And do you think God would’ve bothered to create all those miracles and not created a heaven to go right along with them?” She shook her head. “Not me.”

“Guess I don’t either,” Gwendy says now, standing in front of the weather deck’s floor-to-ceiling window. And for perhaps the first time in her adult life, she truly believes it. Gwendy has an unobstructed bird’s-eye view of earth below, but she doesn’t even give it a glance. Instead, she gazes far off into the mysteries of the up-above and forever-onward whispers, “For me, you were the biggest miracle of all, Mom.”