Eighteen Years Earlier
The day I first noticed it I was more concerned about being in trouble than anything. I knew there would be yelling and cluttered red-faced fury aimed in my direction. The initial shattering had been like a gunshot in a movie. It was sudden and loud enough to “momentarily spook the streaks off your teeth” as my grandma might say.
The aftermath was a crime scene without any yellow tape. A pool of spilled red, pink and white shards on the floor like scattered bits of my own emotions: pieces of panic here, shards of shame there, some sharp crumbs of misplaced indignation. I could have got a broom. I could have got a dustpan.
I didn’t. I stepped through it, making my socks soggy with thick juice, weighed down, sticky in between the toes and squelching as I walked. The plain white socks fell limply halfway down off my feet as I padded away from the kitchen.
The house was hushed that evening and made my breath feel too loud and thoughts like shouts in the dark. 'I didn’t mean to,' I thought as I retreated away from the mess, 'it was a mistake.' The light slanted in through the windows in long thin strips that imprisoned the carpet behind bars and left the dusk tight and looming around me.
I could hear my mom on the phone in the other room as I passed: “...No, he didn’t even notice. I know, right? It’s like I could hold smelling salts up that man’s nose and…”
She was talking to Carol on the other line. She was always talking to Carol. She was luckily in the living room reclining on the couch and assuming I could take care of myself. And I could take care of myself.
She warned me about the cup though. She even said it out loud: “Emily, you better be careful with your grandma’s tea cup.”
I am careful.
I made my way up the stairs where the sunlight disappeared and the hallway was lined with rows of fakey-smiling faces. I never understood why people smile in pictures if they don’t mean it. My mother would never hang a frowning person’s face in our hallway, but I didn’t see how it was better to have people pretending there instead.
I crept in front of frames of family and cousins and a grandma or two in my gross sticky socks. I rankled under their gazes, they must know, I dashed to the second door on the right and pressed it open quietly.
I bolted inside like a spy on an adventure and took a deep breath as I glanced around the room. My father’s office was a stilted conversation all on its own. It had stoic bookshelves that reached the ceiling, and a single window with no blinds, a huge black desk, and a snake pit of cords crowded by the chair. Stark against everything else were misprinted mugs, like a Christmas one that just said “Naught” on it, model plains with missing cockpits, and novelty statues of liberty with no torch on shelf after shelf.
I climbed up on the spinning office chair without disturbing it and carefully crawled onto the desk (I am careful). There, on the desk, was one of my father’s favorite bargain-bin deals from one of the many local yard sales that mom forced us to go to. My mom barely bought anything, but he picked it up with a laugh and declared: “look how crazy this is!”
My dad delighted in things that were wrong, or useless, or outdated and a little off, he got a kick out of toys with the wrong voice box and half-printed fortune cookies. This globe was no different.
My dad explained how weird it was a couple times to me. It still had the Soviet Union on it in big blocky letters, a ghost of a country from a past I couldn’t remember or care about. The map also misspelled Arkansas as “Arckansas” and notably cut-off half of New Zealand. It was almost impressive to erase half of an entire country from the world.
Nonetheless, my favorite thing about the map wasn’t the lines and words and nonsense mistakes. The globe was a topographical map with bumps and ridges for mountains and dips and indents for rivers and oceans.
I was always a touchy kind of kid: I liked to plunge my hands into the sandbox to feel the granules. I would run my hands through my mom’s soft hair when she let me. I reveled in finger painting hours where I streaked my fingers through the watery goop and spread it on the paper with a religious fervor.
The topographical globe was no different. My socks dried crusty and hard on my feet as I ran my fingers over the rocky mountains and touched the crooked lines of the Grand Canyon. I ran my hands over the smooth plains and plastic valleys. It was cool to the touch and almost soft in a way that unwound my squiggly nerves.
That’s the first time I really noticed it.
I turned the globe and traced the Himalayan mountains just as my eye caught on something. It wasn’t very big, but there was something about it that was different. It was darker than the rest of the map and there was no label on either side of it.
It was a perfectly round black dot in the middle of the big fat state of the Soviet Union, right next to the printed word “Siberia.”
I frowned at it for a moment, but even by then I knew that my father’s globe wasn’t to be trusted-- it was missing half of New Zealand after all. I dismissed it, though my eyes kept wondering back to the dark dot on the map, again and again. Sometimes it even seemed to be growing larger.
I blinked and a voice was calling up to me.
“Emily? Emily! Did you spill all this juice?!” My mother’s voice crackled from downstairs. An hour must have already passed without me noticing. I snapped back to myself. “Ugh!” A shriek followed, “grandma’s teacup!”
I scrambled off the desk with the “sorry! Sorry!” bright on my lips. A sorry that might buy me a few less minutes of purpling anger and “I warned you about this!” A sorry that I could trade, sell, and barter for a little less burning of her bright blue eyes.
Tears were already prickling near the corners of my eyes though.
I’m sorry, mom, I’m sorry.
I felt like I was always saying that in one way or another.
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