Some Go, Some Stay

“I don’t understand why you always have to do things like this,” Kate said aloud, when she got Olivia’s text.

She was alone, standing under the ash tree in her yard, watching the stained glass window of leaves swishing above her head. A bird spiraled in the sky, churning in a whirlpool of wind. The wind might gradually be wearing out life’s seams, but it seemed like a living thing itself, turning leaves into birds, and birds into slowly pirouetting leaves. Below her feet, a network of wooden arms spread, extending their fingers as far into the earth as they could reach, secure from the death billowing above. Kate touched the bark and imagined herself falling into the comfort of the steady black earth.

She pulled out her phone. I don’t understand, she said to Olivia. Let’s meet up and talk. At the park. I’m sure we can work this out.

Kate preferred the stagnant part of the creek to the white water, so she chose a bench in front of a pool of lily pads to wait. She remembered when they were girls and Olivia, having read too many picture books with frogs as characters, tried to walk on some lily pads. It was at a different creek, in a different town, but it happened on this planet. Maybe if Olivia could remember the beauty around her, she wouldn’t choose to leave it all behind.

She recognized Olivia the instant her distant figure appeared on the paved walkway, swinging her arms like a broken marionette, crooked on the right side. The two women were still out of earshot from each other and they had to look at something other than each other so that the upcoming discussion wouldn’t seem like the only thing they were thinking about. Kate focused on the spread of moss beneath the bench and Olivia turned her eyes to the sky, searching the blue.

Olivia broke the silence first. “Hi,” she said, waving, pretending she’d only then seen her sister.

“How are things with you?” asked Kate.

“Everything’s great,” said Olivia. “A lot of goodbyes and see you laters. But most of us are in the same boat. Well, in different boats. All headed in the same direction.”

“Yeah,” said Kate, nodding. “It sounds like the decision is pretty hard to make.”

“It’s already been made. I’m going. So is Rodger, we’re on the same ship. Married couples get to stay together, especially if they’re trying for a baby like we are.”

“And you think space would be a good environment for a child?” asked Kate. She hoped she wasn’t being too forward, but couldn’t think of a softer way to make her argument.

“You and I both know that staying isn’t an option,” said Olivia. “In fifty years everything will be gone.”

Kate didn’t say anything. But look around, Olivia, at all the trees and squirrels and grass. Watch how the creek moves— all together, like a glass sculpture, carving a trail into the ground. Scattering the light from our sun, illuminating hundreds of little insects dancing like fairies in the gold. You’ll never see water running again.

That’s what she wanted to tell her sister, but the words, fading and appearing, lost themselves in the shifting ashes of her convictions. All she knew was that getting on a rocket ship would be like abandonment— leaving behind a beautiful living creature that we were responsible for caring for.

“I know this is hard,” said Olivia, “but you have to go. The wind isn’t just going to stop. The leak will keep spreading. That is a fact, whether you admit it or not.”

So Olivia had also come with an agenda. To drag Kate into the void with her. For Kate’s own survival. As if the Earth was just going to give up. As if she were just going to give up on the Earth.

Before the leak, the girls lived in the forest. Their mother knew that freedom was the biggest gift she could give her daughters, so they never saw the inside of the classroom, climbing trees and making up secret languages instead. Kate and Olivia were identical twins, but Kate never felt identical to Olivia. Olivia was just another person— a loud and misbehaving person who she loved dearly— who, along with her mother, and the forest on the eastern side of the Rockies, ruled the rhythm of her life. Mealtimes, reading, play, snow and dust, all together. Until the wind’s force threw their rhythm off balance.

The wind held the blame for the leak. The nuclear plant exploded in the desert, and it was the wind who spread it upwards and out like a forest fire. They’d only had a few days to get up and go, they lived too close, and scientists hadn’t yet figured out how to contain wind to slow it. Kate was alone the day it happened.

When their mother was pregnant with them, Kate took most of the nutrients and Olivia was born small and weak with a bad heart. For some reason people who didn’t know them well assumed it was Kate who had a weak heart. Kate sometimes asked herself whether if she had been the one who’d had the bad heart and who’d been in the hospital, so far away during the explosion, she would be more like Kate, so ready to abandon the planet that had cared for them.

There wasn’t enough money to take Kate with them to the hospital in the east, but her mom said she was responsible, and could be trusted to live by herself and work on schoolwork alone for a week, if she checked in with the neighbors every so often.

“Whatever you do,” Kate’s mother said to her, “Don’t leave, for any reason. If you do, anything could happen to you, and the house would be alone, without anyone to look after it. You have to promise you’ll stay here.”

Kate promised, and then she started to cry, even though she was ten, and could have been more mature about everything if she’d tried. She’d never spent the night without Olivia.

Her mother pulled her in for a hug, and when Olivia saw them hugging, she also sprung up and joined. A brief irritation passed through Kate— couldn’t Olivia let her get some of their mother’s affection for once?

“Listen girls,” said their mother after letting her daughters go, “I bought a little gift for the two of you so you can think of each other when you’re apart.”

She pulled two little cardboard boxes out of her coat pocket and gave one to each girl. Kate took the time to gently unfold her box, so she saw Olivia’s gift, who’d ripped through her wrapping paper as quickly as possible, before she saw her own. A golden heart shaped locket with the words “best friends” engraved on the front. She found an identical one in her own box..

“It’s my new heart,” said Olivia. Kate laughed and glanced at their mother to see her reaction.

“They’re lockets,” said their mother, ignoring Olivia. “If you put a little bit of earth inside, you’ll always have a part of the woods that binds you together.”

Olivia said it was a wonderful idea, and then ran outside, Kate behind her. They dug into the dry dust that fell over top of the rocky underlayer, and pulled out a pinch to hold onto forever. When it was time to say goodbye, they both wore their lockets, and clutched onto them long after the final hug.

That night, Kate lay in bed alone, without the metronome of Olivia’s breath to lull her to sleep. She stared into the dark for a long time, imagining life if Olivia didn’t survive her surgery. She pictured herself jumping off a cliff in grief and crawled into Olivia’s bed, still unmade from that same morning. She fell asleep awash in her sister’s scent.

When she woke up, people were talking. They were inside of her house. You have to come with us, sweetie. You can’t live here anymore. The lights flickered on, and she saw three people, two men and a woman, some of the neighbors. It’s time to go Kate.

Kate had no clear memory of the next three hours, but somehow, they dragged her out. She hadn’t wanted to go, her mother told her not to. Stay here no matter what. At one point she had flung herself on the floor, kicking her feet wildly. I’m not leaving. I’m not. I can’t leave the woods to be destroyed.

The neighbor grabbed her arms to hold her down. This will all be destroyed whether or not you leave. We’re going now. And so one of the men pulled her outside in her pajamas, not giving her the chance to grab any photo albums, any stuffed animals, or any of her clothes. He put her in the back of his truck. No, said Kate, but the truck was moving, and it was too dark for her to get one last look at the woods. The truck bounced over potholes, and then it was morning and they were somewhere far away, in the middle of the countryside, surrounded by farmland all around. Kate reached to her neck to feel for her necklace, and found that it was gone. We have to go back, she said, but the man and his companions ignored her. They were talking about nuclear energy, and Kate slouched in her seat and cried.

For years following the leak, as the wind spread the poison, Kate thought about her necklace. Alone, sitting on their dresser in an empty house, without anyone’s breathing to break up the night. In a charred and desolate wood, the skeletons of trees stretching crooked bones against a grey sky. And how inside that locket was a piece of the forest, hidden and cherished and lost.

She wasn’t going to leave, and Olivia wasn’t going to stay. It was strange, she thought, all this time she’d told herself that Olivia was the stubborn one, but now look, she was wrong, they were both completely unyielding. They could say anything to each other, try to build a bridge from one world to the other, but there were some decisions that were too close to the heart to be changed without breaking it. Olivia’s face, a mere foot from Kate’s, crying, and Kate knew that for the rest of their lives, looking in the mirror would be unbearable.

The tranquility of the golden day— the glimmers of light breaking through the gaps in the foliage, the gentle buzz of life around them— to Kate, it already felt like a memory. She couldn’t think, couldn’t understand how people could just disappear, how the world could just change. Now was now, and now had to be forever, but now was already gone. Two sisters sitting on a bench, saying goodbye, acting as though the stars were just a corner of the woods they grew up in.

“I still have my locket,” said Olivia. “I’ll think of you.”

“I’ll think of you too,” said Kate, and the girls embraced each other.

But Kate knew her own locket was lost, buried under layers of rock, somewhere close to the beating core of the earth. Something had wrenched the two of them apart. Whether it had been a catastrophic explosion, or just the steady hand of the wind pulling them in opposite directions, she wasn’t sure. Somewhere, the violence of life had separated them, and one was going to venture into the stars, clutching a locket full of dust, while the other, knee deep in the mud, dug to find the other half of her missing heart.