OUR NEW HOME

Chapter One: Stargazing

“Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.” My brother Michael stared up at the stars, waiting for the meteor shower to start.

It was expected to be quite a show this year since there was a new moon. Dad took me and Michael out to the desert to get a better view, but it was almost 2am and we still hadn’t seen a single shooting star. In the dark, all I could see on the distant horizon were silhouettes of sand dunes.

“You’ve been reading too many sci-fi books, Mikey.” Dad gently squeezed my arm, aware as he always was of how I was feeling. I felt anxious staring up into that enormous sky, knowing that all the lights I was seeing weren’t even a fraction of what was out there. It made me feel so small.

“This is boring,” I said as I sat up. “Nothing is happening and I’m tired. Can we go home?”

“You’re not bored. You’re just scared” my brother replied. “And it’s not fiction, Dad. It’s just science. Sound travels through the vibration of atoms and molecules in something like air or water. In outer space, there is no air or water, so sound has no way to travel.”

Michael sat up and looked at me with wide eyes. “You could be lost out there, screaming for help, and no one would ever hear you.”

I groaned and buried my face in my dad’s chest. He held me close and said, “Enough, Michael. Be done.” Michael rolled his eyes as he dropped back down on the hard dirt.

We lay still in the quiet, each of us hoping to be the first to spot a fiery streak across the sky. As I scanned the heavens, I began to relax every muscle in my body and wonder what it would be like to float through space. Suddenly, I became aware of how quiet the desert was. We were lying in the middle of an old dried-up lakebed. There used to be water here, but that was a long time ago, and with the rise in global temperatures, this lakebed hadn’t seen rainfall in over fifty years. That’s what Dad said.

Without rain, there wasn’t any wildlife around, so the only sounds I could hear were the sounds of us breathing, and I could barely hear that. As I watched the night sky, I began to feel as though I was really floating. I felt my body lift off the ground and I could feel cool air beneath me. I kept my gaze on the celestial lights and to my own surprise, I didn’t feel anxious. Instead, I felt—

“Woah!” My brother sat up quick, pointing at the sky and bringing me back to Earth. “I saw one! Did you see it, Dad?”

Dad started awake. He had been drifting too and had missed the first meteor of the night.

“There’s another one! Oh! Another!...and another right there!” Michael was ahead of us now. He had spotted four already and Dad and I hadn’t seen any. I had to catch up. I opened my eyes wide and scanned the sky.

“I see one!” I cried.

“I saw it too!” Michael shot back. “Wait. Actually, I still see it. It’s taking a long time. Do you see that, Dad? Is that a meteor?”

Dad squinted and followed the invisible line from Michael’s finger toward space. Meteors were falling every couple of seconds now, but we all focused on the one slow moving star. “I see something, alright. Not sure what that is, to tell you the truth.”

“A UFO!” Michael shouted.

“Too many sci-fi’s, Mikey,” I said as I rolled my eyes at him.

“Technically,” my know-it-all brother responded, “UFO is short for unidentified flying object. Can you identify it?”

“No,” I answered honestly.

“No,” he repeated. “That means it is an unidentified flying object. A UFO, Genius.”

I rolled my eyes at him and watched the stars falling from the sky. They were beautiful and awful. I thought of Chicken Little crying, “The sky is falling!” Right now, it felt less like a kid’s story and more like reality. I wondered how many stars were out there if this many could be shooting out of the sky.

“Whatever it is,” Dad said, “it’s getting bigger. Kids, get in the truck right now. We’re going home.”

I could tell by Dad’s voice that he thought we were in danger. I looked up at the sky and saw that the UFO (or whatever it was) actually did seem to be getting bigger, but it was still really far away and I couldn’t figure out why Dad was so scared of a shooting star.

“Dad, it’s far away. Can’t we wait and see where it goes?” I was suddenly overcome with an unusual sense of adventure, and I didn’t want to leave now.

“Hannah, no. Get in the truck, now.” He looked at my brother who hadn’t moved either. “Michael, truck. Now!”

Michael and I looked at each other, confused and disappointed, and got in the truck. Dad started the engine and sped off through the lakebed. The truck had all-terrain tires, but the lakebed had big rocks that lifted me up and hurt my butt as I fell hard onto the seat.

“Dad, slow down. These rocks are hurting my butt!”

“Hannah, if what I think I saw is actually what I saw, then your butt needs to get as far away as possible right now.” Dad sounded like a madman.

“Do you think it really is a UFO, Dad?” Michael’s voice cracked with excitement.

“Michael, I don’t know what that thing is, but I have a really bad feeling about it.” He drove faster through the lakebed but couldn’t find a road out. We seemed to be getting deeper into the desert, away from home.

I looked out the window as meteors were now flying through the sky. I could see the one slow star getting brighter, and bigger.

“Dad, I don’t think this is the way we came. Do you know where we’re going?” I was getting scared.

He didn’t answer me right away and as the meteors kept falling, so did my hopes that we were actually going home. I closed my eyes and thought of our home, where Mom was. She would know what to do right now, but she had stayed back because she had to be up early for work. She was an ER nurse, and she had an early shift at the hospital. I didn’t even want to come out here in the first place because the idea of space makes me anxious, but Mom told me it was going to be a great show and that I would be sad to have missed it. Now I was sad to not be at home with her.

Dad never responded, but I knew the answer. We were lost in the vastness of the empty desert. The slow star was getting closer.

“I read about this in one of my books,” Michael said. His excited eyes were fixed on the UFO. “It’s a superbolide!” He rolled down his window from the front passenger seat and stuck his head into the night.

“A super what?” I asked.

My brother turned around to face me.

“A superbolide. A huge meteor headed straight for Earth!” He lowered his voice and said, “In a world where three people wander aimlessly through the desert night, a meteor threatens to destroy life as they know it!” He was very amused with himself.

“Dad!” I cried.

“Michael, enough!” Dad gripped the wheel harder. “None of this looks familiar. Where is that road?” He was looking furiously around for a way out.

“Dad!” I repeated, my eyes wide and focused on the road ahead. I could tell he didn’t see it.

“Hannah, not now! I’m trying to get us out of here!”

“DAD! Watch out!” I screamed.

It was too late. In an instant, we crashed into the boulder. Michael flew forward toward the windshield, but his seatbelt pulled him back, throwing his seat into my lap. Both front airbags blew up. I couldn’t see Dad. My head hit the back of the truck cabin and I slid down, gazing out the back window. Slowly my eyes closed as I watched the slow star grow bigger until all of the lights went out.

Unbearable heat woke me up. With my eyes closed, I saw orange and knew the sun was up. I could feel sweat drip through dried blood on my face. My head felt like someone was squeezing the right side of my brain and my neck felt stiff. I wiggled my toes and fingers as I assessed the rest of my body for damage. I opened my eyes and shut them tight again. The sun was bright overhead. It must have been close to noon.

“Hannah?” My brother’s voice was weak and scared. His tone was so different from the condescending way he usually talked to me. “Hannah? Are you alive?”

“Yes, Mikey,” I answered. “I’m alive.” I paused, afraid of the answer to the question on my mind. “Is Dad?”

The silence made me open my eyes again. I blinked a few times until everything came into focus. I saw Dad’s airbag, but I didn’t see Dad. The driver’s side door was open and from the back of the truck, I could see drops of blood in the dirt outside. My heart raced, pumping my own blood quickly through my body as I sat up.

Michael was alive, but his eyes were still closed, his head against the door where his window was still open.

“Mikey!” My voice startled him, but he struggled to become alert. I couldn’t wait for him to open the door and let me out. I climbed into the front seat where Dad was supposed to be and shook Michael hard. “Mikey, wake up! Dad’s not here and I can see blood in the dirt!”

That was the adrenaline jolt he needed to start moving. He threw open his door and ran around the truck, meeting me at the site of Dad’s blood on the ground. We stared at each other for what seemed like minutes. Neither of us knew where Dad was, or if he was even alive. We crouched down in the dirt, and Michael studied the drops of blood.

“These are fresh drops,” he said. “Dad was here not too long ago.”

I stood up and took in the landscape around us. “Michael? Are we in the Grand Canyon?”

“No, Stupid. This desert is only about an hour from home. The Grand Canyon is hundreds of miles away. It’s in another state and it’s a lot bigger than this.” He stood up and pointed East as he finally saw what I did. We were standing in a huge bowl of desert.

“What the hell? How did we get in this huge crater? This has to be about a mile wide!” He turned in a full circle and stopped at the cause of the crash. “This is what we hit, Hannah.” He walked closer, studying it.

“Yeah, I know. It’s a huge boulder.”

I didn’t know why there was a big boulder in the middle of the desert, and it didn’t make sense that we were in a huge crater. I thought we were on the lakebed last night.

“It’s not a boulder,” he said, walking closer to it. “It’s a meteor. A pretty huge one, actually. I bet that’s what we saw last night. The UFO.”

We walked toward the giant rock. From the other side, I heard a sound, like a muffled cough.

“Dad?” I ran around to see my father bent over a puddle of vomit.

“Hannah, are you ok?” Dad was wiping his mouth with one sleeve of his dirty shirt, sweat with the other sleeve. He wrapped his arms around me and asked, “Where’s Michael?”

“Dad?” Michael caught up to us. “Dad, are you ok? We thought you were dead! Are you ok?”

“Yes, Son. I’m ok. I came over to see what we hit.” Dad reached out and pulled Michael into our hug. “Looks like we collided with your UFO, Kid.”

It didn’t make sense to me. I knew I had hit my head pretty hard—I had the blood to prove it—but I remembered watching the UFO after our impact. It was the last thing I saw before I lost consciousness. This couldn’t be it.

“Dad, this isn’t Mikey’s UFO,” I said, pulling away from the sweaty group hug. “You were looking for the way home and I was looking straight ahead. I saw this boulder before we hit it, but after we hit it, I watched that UFO get bigger until I finally blacked out.”

“Hannah,” Dad spoke slowly, in that voice he used to try to reason with me, “you hit your head pretty hard. I can see the blood. What we all saw last night was this meteor.” He turned toward the rock and touched it gently, as though he might break the massive thing that almost broke us.

“Dad, I’m not a little kid. I know what I saw. This rock isn’t the slow star we saw last night. I swear!”

He always knew what I was feeling, and I knew he could tell I was sure of what I saw last night. Still, he didn’t seem convinced.

“Ok, Sweetie,” he said, placing his big hand on my shoulder. “I believe you’re sure of what you saw. The fact right now is that this rock is what we hit, and we’re all lucky to be alive, but the truck wasn’t so lucky. Now we’re here in the hot desert with limited water and no way to get home. We need to find our way out of this crater and back home.”

He turned to my brother. “Michael, there’s a gallon of emergency water in the truck bed and Mom packed us those midnight snacks for our stargazing show. They’re in the backpack. Go see what’s left.” Michael nodded and ran to the back of the truck.

Mom always sends more food than we need. For family gatherings and parties, she always makes way too much food, just to be sure that no one is hungry. She once told me that when she was growing up, Grandma and Grandpa didn’t have a lot of money, so sometimes there wasn’t enough food for her and her brothers and sisters. So, when she grew up and had a family of her own, she wanted to make sure that no one was ever without enough food.

Whenever we go to the grocery store, Mom buys ready-to-eat meals that she keeps in the car, just in case we ever run into a homeless person or someone asking for food. Dad says that’s something that made him fall in love with her. I love that about her too.

For our stargazing adventure, Mom packed six peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, three oranges, a gallon bag of trail mix, and a gallon bag of homemade chocolate chip cookies. Dad ate one of the sandwiches and an orange last night. Mikey and I each ate a sandwich and shared half the bag of cookies (his half was more than mine).

“Thers shtill a lah in hur,” Michael said, with half a sandwich in his mouth and a cookie in his hand. He was wearing the backpack and carrying the water in his other hand.

“Not for long, I’m sure,” Dad said. “Hannah, grab a sandwich and an orange. Let’s eat before we head out. It shouldn’t take us very long to get out of this crater, but once we do, we’re still in the middle of the desert.”

I took the backpack from Michael, pulled out two sandwiches, and handed one to Dad.

“Thanks, Hannah,” he said. “Michael, eat your orange too.” Michael scarfed down the other half of his sandwich and tore into his orange. The cookie was long gone.

“Daylight is our friend, so let’s head West,” Dad said. “Like I said, it should only take us about 20 minutes to get out of this crater, but the desert…that’s another story. We need to find a ride home.”

As we walked, I thought about the Saturday morning hikes we would go on as a family. We live near the mountains, so there are a lot of good hiking trails around. Dad says a lot of the trails used to have water all the time, but since global warming took off, the water is a lot less common. He told us that his dad used to go on some of the same hikes and that there were waterfalls all over the place when Grandpa was a kid. I would love to have seen that! Sometimes when I’m in the shower, I pretend I’m in a waterfall on one of those hikes, but it’s never long before Dad tells me to “Save some water for the fish we still have!”

“I wonder where that meteor came from” Michael said. We’d been walking in silence for several minutes, everyone lost in their own thoughts.

“What meteor?” I asked, interrupted from my waterfalls.

“That big-ass rock we hit? Boy, you are dense sometimes, Hannah.”

“Michael, watch your mouth,” Dad said. He was walking a few feet ahead of us.

“Well, we’ve been quiet for so long,” I said, “I wasn’t thinking about that dumb rock anymore. Jeeze.”

Ignoring me, he continued, “All meteors come from within our solar system. It probably came from somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. I wonder if there were any lost space travelers out there.” Pretending to be a person lost in space, he said, “Hey! I’m out here! Help! Give me a ride to Earth!”

“No one would hear them anyway,” I said, feeling smart. “You said nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space. Remember?”

“Or so they say,” he replied.

After about twenty minutes, we came to the edge of the crater.

“I thought those were just sand dunes last night” I said as I looked up at the sloping dirt.

“Well, pretty much,” Dad said. “Upward and onward!”

“I’ll race you to the top, Mikey!” I said. “Winner gets the rest of the cookies!”

“Whah cuckees?” Michael said, another cookie stuffed into his mouth. He swallowed hard and took off up the hill. I chased him as fast as I could, determined to make him pay for eating the last of Mom’s cookies.

I sprinted up the hill and stopped hard a few feet behind him. We were both frozen by what lay before us. We didn’t move a muscle until Dad caught up behind us.

“What the hell…?” Dad walked slowly toward us and stopped.

“It looks like the Millennium Falcon!” Michael said. “What the fu—”

“Michael! Watch your mouth!” Dad wasn’t too stunned to stop Michael from swearing.

“Dad, is that…a spaceship?” I couldn’t believe my eyes.

The craft was enormous, and it did look a lot like the ship from Star Wars. I expected Chewbacca to come out and greet us in Wookie. Suddenly, a door lifted open, a ramp descended, and a woman—a human woman—stepped out.

“I’ve been waiting for you to get here. Get in. We need to go, now,” she said.

In disbelief, my brother and I called out in unison, “MOM?”