The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker Page B

eat.”
    My father didn’t answer, but I was eager to calm her. “We’ll be ready soon,” I said.
    I liked the idea, how the past could be preserved, fossilized, in the stars. I wanted to think that somewhere on the other end of time, a hundred light years from then, someone else, some distant future creature, might be looking back at a preserved image of me and my father at that very moment in my bedroom.
    “Couldn’t that be true?” I said to my father. “Like a hundred light-years from now?”
    “Could be,” he said.
    But I wasn’t sure he was listening.
    I would spend a lot of hours watching the stars that year, but I used my telescope to spy on nearer bodies, too. I soon realized I could see into the other houses on the street. I could see the Kaplans, all seven of them, sitting down to dinner. I could see Carlotta at the end of our cul-de-sac, drinking tea on her porch, her long braid dangling like macramé, its every strand apparent through the lens of my telescopep; and there was Tom behind her, dumping a bucket of slop onto their compost pile.
    My clearest view was of Sylvia’s house. Hers faced ours like a mirror image, and I could see right into her living room—to the keys of her piano, to the wood boards of her floor, right to the pages of the newspaper that still lined the birdcage, now empty.
    That night we slept in sunlight, or we didn’t sleep at all. For weeks, I’d been climbing into bed before dark—those early days were endless, those first evenings everlasting; I fell asleep most nights before the stars came out. But this night was different, the gap wider than ever. This was the first of the white nights. We would later learn to shield ourselves, to carve out small patches of darkness amid the light, but that first clock night was radiant, as if the sun had never shone so brilliantly or bright.
    On my bedroom ceiling was a scattering of glow-in-the-dark star stickers that I had recently tried to remove. My mother had stopped me—“There’s asbestos in that ceiling, leave it alone.” But my ceiling stars were invisible on this night anyway, just like the real ones were, every one of them washed out by our nearest, dearest star.
    “Try to sleep,” said my father. “It’s going to be hard to wake up for school in the dark.” He sat at the foot of my bed, staring at the window, at the blazing blue sky before pulling the blinds shut. “These are amazing times,” he said. “We’re living in some amazing times.”
    The sun finally set sometime after two.

11
    The next day our school returned to its clock time start of nine o’clock. That meant we stood in darkness at the bus stop, our faces lit yellow by a distant streetlight, which, like all the streetlights in our region, had been specially designed for dimness—bright lights spoiled the view for the enormous thirty-year-old university telescope that sat on a hill out east.
Light pollution,
they called it. But what were those astronomers staring at anymore, now that the real action was happening down here?
    My mother waited in the car at the curb until the bus arrived, convinced that danger, like potatoes, breeds in the dark. To me, the bus stop seemed just as hazardous as in daylight, and no more so in the dark.
    I’d been staying away from Daryl, but he ignored me and acted as if he hadn’t done anything wrong. Somewhere in that dark dirt, I thought, my gold-nugget necklace probably still lay. Seth continued to keep to himself, like a lonesome survivor, blowing on his hands in an attractive, self-sufficient way, one foot on his skateboard, the other on the curb.
    Hanna’s house was just visible in the distance down the street, and I thought I saw a small light glowing near the front door that morning. I felt a flash of hope that she’d come home. But it was only the porch light, probably left on by accident when they fled, the light unnoticed in the daylight.
    We were all quieter than usual on that dark morning. We were