Mirror in the Sky by Aditi Khorana Page B

she wanted to be there for me anyway.
    We turned onto Halle’s street, a long unlit road in back-country Greenwich flanked by wraithlike trees springing up from the fog below.
    â€œIt’s just here, down this road. I don’t understand people who live here. It’s sort of . . .”
    â€œCreepy?”
    â€œYeah. But then, Connecticut. Who actually wants to
be
here?”
    â€œI didn’t know you felt that way.”
    â€œIt’s fine, I guess, but it’s not the real world. I can’t wait to move to the city. Once I get outta here, I’m never coming back. What about you? Where would you live if you could live anywhere in the world?”
    We turned into a long driveway unspooling before us forwhat felt like miles. We were almost there, and yet I wanted to stay in this car and talk to him all night.
    â€œI don’t know . . . Paris, maybe. Or Rome.”
    â€œYup, cosmopolitan Tara. Not like us country bumpkins.”
    I laughed. “You’re hardly a country bumpkin.”
    â€œI bet you’re going to go do really cool things when you grow up,” he said.
    â€œI don’t know . . .” I was getting self-conscious and felt the need to turn the conversation on him. “What do you want to do when you grow up?”
    â€œAll this Terra Nova stuff . . . it kind of makes me want to be a scientist.”
    â€œMy dad wanted to be a scientist,” I blurted out.
    â€œWhat kind?”
    â€œHe wanted to be a physicist . . .” I said quietly. Just saying it aloud, something I had never done in front of a stranger, felt like a betrayal. It was an admission that my father had failed in some way. He had failed to achieve his dream, and so what sort of example could he set for me? Maybe my mother was right—she was leaving and going to California because my father had given up on his dream—he
had
failed. And because she wanted to talk to her dead parents. But mostly, probably, I thought she wanted to get away from us.
    â€œHe must be really into all this Terra Nova stuff.”
    I was quiet for a moment. I thought about that other Tara. Was she sitting in Nick’s car right now too? Was she amazed at the fact that she had been invited to a party at Halle Lightfoot’s house? The bigger question was, how was she different fromme? Was she smarter, more comfortable in her skin? Did she know to throw back a flirty retort when Nick Osterman called her pretty?
    And what about that other version of my father? Was he a physicist on Terra Nova? Did he decide to stick it out in graduate school, even if it was hard and he didn’t know how he would support his family? On Terra Nova, was the other version of my mother running away to California?
    I pondered these things until Halle’s house came into view, making me inadvertently gasp. It was a white three-story plantation-style colonial extending out in various wings. Tall columns reached up to touch the roofline, and the windows of the house were all lit. Hundred-year-old oak trees dotted the rolling greens that spanned every direction, and the hedges were meticulously trimmed into inorganic shapes.
    Nick pulled into the gravel drive, parking his car alongside a black Range Rover.
    â€œLooks like Veronica’s already here,” he said, turning off the ignition. I simply sat for a moment, looking at the awe-inspiring structure before me.
    â€œIt’s just Halle and her parents, right? She’s an only child, right?”
    â€œYeah, and their two dogs—Christine Lagarde and, well, Mario. Mario Draghi was the one who . . .”
    Despite the memory of what had happened earlier that week, I couldn’t help but cut him off. “They named their dogs after the director of the IMF and the president of the European Central Bank?”
    â€œSee, I didn’t even know who those people were when she told me.”
    â€œI have