At least, that’s what she tells Mom and me three weeks after Dad leaves on a shiny September Sunday, nicking the corner of our mailbox as he peels out of the drive, exhaust fumes roaring through the ancient muffler like rocket fuel in his wake.
My sister tells us he’s gone back to his home planet. The gravity won’t weigh him down there, and he can ski from volcano to volcano over carbon dioxide frost. She says the rest of us are probably just too human for him to stay. Or to take us with him.
My sister starts wearing only red. Scarlet t-shirts, carnelian skirts, burgundy Mary Janes. She asks Mom to fill her lunch box with strawberries and pepperoni, pomegranates and beets. Now her lips and tongue are always stained red, red, red.
When Mom picks us up from school, the other girls giggle into their hands as my sister walks past. Behind her back, a few of them waggle index finger antennae. Others don tapered tinfoil hats.
Citing my sister’s monochromatic diet, Mom makes an appointment with the doctor. When the pediatrician asks her age, my sister says, five, and I look up from my Game Boy to explain, in Martian years. The doctor gives Mom a specialist’s card, then holds out a jar of lollipops. My sister picks the last cherry Dum Dum left.
That weekend, Mom packs up the station wagon and takes us camping in the desert. I know she wants to show my sister someplace alien, remote. A place with no trees or Stop & Shops or swimming pools, only dried out creek beds and iron-rich rock.
But my sister looks happy here. She presses her hands against rusty stone spires. Drops a fossil she finds into our mother’s palm. Yanks me back from a scorpion skittering past our tent. And at night, she makes us lie on the ground and gaze up at stars that seem barely miles away.
Years from now, at a cafe around the corner from her lab, my sister will not mention Dad, or Mom, or even Mars. Instead, she will tell me about how our planets used to be just one big nebula of dust and gas, before they coalesced into their separate selves, sometimes drawing near each other, sometimes spinning apart. She will talk about cosmic background radiation, how the origin of everything is still there, still everywhere, all around us.
Which will make me wonder if part of us is also still here in the desert tonight. If we are still watching the universe wheel above us, dark and glittering and vast, as my sister points out a reddish pinprick of light. As she describes the way we each orbit the sun a little differently, saying, Sometimes, our worlds are closer than this. As finally it starts to feel a little less hard to be human when Mom takes our hands in hers, squeezes them, and says, Yes. But isn’t it still so bright?
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