All the Wonders We Keep

My father once said that our planet was a tiny miracle amidst an infinite catastrophe.

Of course, at the ripe age of nine the words hadn’t been meant for me- they’d been meant for the science buffs who listened to his podcast, but for the longest time after eavesdropping I couldn’t get them out of my head. I’d lie awake at night contemplating their validity; what made Earth a miracle and could the universe possibly stretch on and on forever?

I questioned so many things because of those words, a little philosopher with an air of somber perplexity. Mostly and for the first time in my existence, I questioned my father and his persistently optimistic view of life and of the world.

I was never the type of person to believe in miracles, even back then; even before I’d fully familiarized myself with the opposing concept of despair. At nine, the planet hadn’t yet given me a reason to fully hate or love it.

Although now as I reflect, I have to admit that I’ve always loved the planet’s sky. The night sky is my favorite, even when there are no stars. And there are hardly any stars nowadays. I don’t see any tonight anyway, here in Montana as I wander aimlessly in the mild October dusk to clear my head, with the dissipating smell of smoke and char stinging my nose.

Dad once said that I was born looking up, up past him and my mom. Always looking up at the sky. He used to say sappy things like that all time. Things like, There is beauty in everything, Senita. Even in destruction. I used to roll my eyes, my subtle way of making him see that we were different.

Because we were so very different.

Mostly, we differed on perspective and experience. Prime example: Atlantic City had always been just another fantasy world to me, one that had been lost to time like the city of Atlantis. I used to imagine them both as these grand, glittering metropolises where people frolicked in sunlight that felt like a kiss upon the cheek instead of a harsh slap. They were havens of happiness that rested in calm waters, where life existed harmoniously, and no one worried about the next Big Event because they’d never even witnessed a little one.

To Dad, however, Atlantic City was a place where he’d first met my mom before the flood of ‘54. It was a place that existed in tangible memory; a place that he had called home during a brief span of his twenties while studying the effects of warming ocean water on marine life migration.

He’d gotten the chance to make real impressions of America’s Favorite Playground before most of it finally slipped into the sea in 2062. I was only a year old then.

Of course, I hadn’t exactly given my father the opportunity to share his impressions with me. I was the oldest daughter, the one who wanted nothing to do with the busy marine biologist father who tried so hard to do right and to be loved by his children. I didn’t think his defeated and exasperated expressions whenever I’d scoff or shrug at his stories were proof enough that he actually cared if I cared. I certainly didn’t think a day would ever come when I’d subconsciously pause after every statement that I uttered, just waiting for his cheesy, profound input.

I took so much for granted, back then.

My little sister Calla used to love listening to Dad’s stories. She’d ooh and aah over the picturesque canvases that he’d paint in our minds of places that had succumbed to weather ruin before the two of us were even an idea. Cal would laugh when Dad poked fun at new products that had hit the market and she would tear up while they watched Extinct Environment together. She was his tiny replicate.

She even looked like him too, from her lustrous black curls to her thin, athletic legs. I’d always secretly envied her flawless skin and her ethereal aura. I detested the way everything came so easy and so naturally for Calla; the popular kids in school had always wanted her to be popular because they liked her so much, yet she never wanted anything to do with them. She couldn’t understand why I used to hate having to wear the nerdy VR glasses in my science classes- back when the primitive technology was clunky and obnoxious, before the VRChip became a thing. But Cal always thought those ugly headsets were retro and toppa. She was never teased while wearing them like I was.

I was her complete opposite, always trying desperately to fit in by saying the right things, buying the right clothes when I could, and writing about latest trends when I couldn’t. Even three years’ my junior and not even out college, Calla was receiving multiple job offers in the acting industry by the time I was just scrounging up an entry-level position as a journalist with my bachelor’s degree.

I’d inherited more of Mom’s physical characteristics than Dad’s, like her thin auburn locks and her haunted eyes. The virtual portraits (what everyone called VPs) that I had of her in her late twenties could be portraits of my twin sister, but Mom had died before my fourth birthday and so we’d never had the chance to bond over our looks. I even had her knack for writing and her weird love for the tangy aroma of cut onions. God, I can’t remember the last time I had onions.

According to Dad, Mom suffered from anxiety for as long as he’d known her, which I guess I also inherited from her. But Mom’s anxiety turned into post-partum after baby number two. Shortly after, that post-partum morphed into full-fledged depression, and that depression put her in the ground when I was three and a half years old.

Some days I think I’m missing her, but I can never tell if I actually have enough of her left in me to miss.

The soft creaking of two bare tree branches rubbing against each other suddenly rolls through the night ahead of me. Jarred from my thoughts, I freeze and focus my eyesight into the dying woods. Oaks and birches that should’ve been clinging to the last dredges of russet-gold leaves stand like naked sentinels against the dim light of a thin, smog-shrouded crescent moon. Most of the spruce trees in Montana had also stopped producing fresh needles a few years back, which was just one of the many consequences of the changing temperatures. More dead trees.

Cal’s heart broke when we first got off the Hyperloop the other day and she saw this sorry excuse of a forest as we were checking into the motel, but Dad’s would have shattered into a million unrepairable pieces. The both of them had always been devout activists and they used to bemoan me as if I was Anti-Nature, but the truth was that I too felt the sadness; I just kept it buried deep enough that it would never reflect on my face.

I had always been that way, ever since I was old enough to process my emotions. Mom and Dad named us kids after each of their favorite plants from their ancestral lands, and I used to get angry at them because Calla was named after a flower, but I was named after a cactus.

Dad used to say he only chose the Senita Cactus because it reminded him of his Mexican heritage and because its unmatched resilience had always captivated him, but I never believed him; I always chose to fixate on what the cactus looked like compared to the flower.

Ironically enough, I can see a resemblance in myself and that damn cactus now. We’re both prickly and dried out on the surface but somewhere inside, we’re bursting.

At first, I don’t see anything out of the ordinary in the woods before me, and I’m about to give up when the creaking noise comes again from the same direction as before. When I spot the glow of large, orblike golden eyes shining back at me from a branch just overhead, the ragged breath that I inhale gets stuck somewhere in my ribcage.

It’s a barn owl, which happened to be Dad’s favorite bird of prey. Their near-extinction numbers on the endangered species list make this rare encounter a miracle in itself.

He would’ve called this a wonder, good old Dad. He’d have frozen, still as a pointing dog on to an interesting scent. That characteristically wry smile he always wore would dawn upon his lips and he’d commit the bird to memory.

Dad loved all of Earth’s creatures, even if his heart held a special fondness for marine life. No VP would have captured the barn owl’s alien black eyes in better detail than the synapses that composed my own father’s hippocampus. He would have remembered the exact number of brown specks on its chest, and he’d have catalogued each of the colors present on its tawny, ruffled feathers- darker browns, gray, and black, from what I can see.

Where most people saw a heart shape in the moondust-white faces of barn owls, my dad saw an apple simply because he looked long enough. He would have found pure joy in seeing this raptor that sits perched in the tree before me like a judgmental visitor. If he were in my shoes, he wouldn’t have been creeped out in the slightest by the way it stared deep into his soul, making him question each and every decision he’d ever made throughout his life like it was currently doing to me.

I’ve made a lot of bad decisions throughout my life, some worse than others but all collectively weighted in my body; ten-pound bones making up my skeleton. With two hundred and six bones in the body, I was struggling under two thousand pounds of error.

One of my mistakes had been blaming Dad for Mom’s death. For twenty-one years out of the thirty-two I’d had thus far, I had blamed him for something that was utterly out of his control.

Mom died in a natural disaster that wrecked our prodigious contemporary smart home in New Jersey. Dad had taken me and Cal to a special nutritionist that day in New York’s Hudson Valley who advertised access to fresh fruits and vegetables for babies. While we were gone for the day, our quaint little Vineland town was devastated by a tsunami that Mom never walked away from.

We still don’t know whether or not she tried to escape or just let the water take her, but knowing her history with mental health, my guess has always been the latter.

It wasn’t dad’s fault, I know that, but I sure as hell tortured him as if it was. He’d moved us further inland as the New Jersey coastline continued to be consumed by the ocean, and Vineland had been far enough away yet still close enough to the water for him to do his job. No one could have predicted the massive collapse of the continental shelf that ran along the New York-New Jersey coastline due to oceanic current flow changes.

Or maybe we could have if society and the powers that be had worked together a little harder. I honestly don’t know anymore.

But even with the devastating loss of his wife and the nightmarish reality that was his daughter perpetually blaming him for that loss, my dad never gave up his optimistic perspective. That was the thing about Dad, he might have felt things deeply when they happened, but he recovered quickly. He was the only man I knew who would cry for an hour over the Business as Usual attitude of humanity, an attitude that was warned against in scenarios during the first half of this century.

But he was also the only man I knew that would be smiling an hour later, and that’s why our perspective differences always strained our relationship. I absolutely never cried, and I very rarely smiled.

The owl that I’ve been staring at for the past ten minutes in my distressed contemplation hoots its agreement, or perhaps its dissent. I’d almost forgotten it was there, which should’ve been impossible because I can’t remember the last time I blinked and broke eye contact.

“Shoo, creepy predator bird. I’m dealing with things here, can’t you tell?” I’m talking to an owl. The fight with Calla that I’d just walked away from a few minutes ago must really have messed with my head. Creepy Owl blinks, its sharp talons clicking against the tree branch, but otherwise it doesn’t budge and so I finally blink myself, my brown eyes watering.

Like a foolish child, I get an ego-boost. I might not have won the fight with my sister, but I won this staring contest.

After the tsunami, Dad moved us from New Jersey to Kentucky to avoid any more saltwater tragedies. At four years old, I didn’t understand the concept of a minimal settlement payout from a bankrupting insurance company and a lower salary as Dad moved from ocean to freshwater biology. I only understood that he was moving us Somewhere New, into a small and ancient house and yeah, maybe that whole time period of my life messed me up a little bit.

I did eventually learn to appreciate Kentucky and the home’s old bones, craftsman style symmetry, and cozy atmosphere- before a month-long wildfire reduced it and my apartment building to ash nineteen years later during 2085.

By then I was twenty-three and settling into a life with my boyfriend-at-the-time, Davix. I was working in that entry-level position at the Grayson Gazette, but things were good. Dad was good, still working and probably would’ve been past retirement but he was otherwise healthy and happy. With the income from her last acting gig, Calla had been able to rent a theatre building where her and her wife who was five years older than her wrote, directed, and produced their own plays with a group of rehabilitated veterans. Their show business was booming, enough to donate a large portion of their profits to environmental and wildlife charities.

I used to watch the actors break into a smile for the first time after a show, and I honestly think Cal was doing them more of a favor than they were her. Most of them had only just returned from the Russian War of 2068 when she was opening her theatre and twelve years later, many of them were a lot more stable and content than when they’d first wandered into her cute little brightly colored building.

Then the wildfire happened, and everything went up in smoke with it. The Gazette started laying off workers, including myself. Dad lost the house, and Cal and Yuli lost the theatre. Neither were covered by insurance since most insurance companies had gone bankrupt by then.

The money that Cal and I had in savings along with the income that Davix was still making was able to float the five of us for about a year or so, but then Davix was let go from his job as an electronics technician and our savings dried up just like the Amazon Savannah.

We’ve been homeless practically ever since, and it’s been eight years.

Now, Dad is gone, and I don’t know what to do with myself. The biggest mistake of the truckload I’d made in my life had been carrying around the unwarranted anger at him, anger that I’d harbored for the vast majority of my life. “I’m still angry.” I say out loud, bitterly shaking my head.

But then, by no doing of my own, the bitterness abates, leaving me a hollow, empty shell. “You left me. You weren’t supposed to leave me.”

When I speak, Creepy Owl cocks its head to that customary ninety-degree angle, otherwise motionless atop its branch. Maybe we’re becoming friends. At least the blowout fights between us wouldn’t be bad, because boy are they terrible with Calla.

It’s not as if I knew anything about her situation when I brought up my thoughts on my pregnancy, and if I had I most certainly would’ve kept my mouth shut. One reason I like to keep my feelings to myself is because you never know what sort of repressed emotions they’re going to elicit from other people.

If I had known my baby sister was infertile, I never would have told her that I was considering giving the baby up for adoption. And if I hadn’t expressed my thoughts to her, she never would have snapped and called me selfish and heartless, among other hurtful things. And if she had never said that, then right now I wouldn’t be thinking about my unrelenting fears of the future and the horrible world I’d be bringing this perfect little baby into if I kept it.

I wouldn’t be biting my fingernails to the quick wondering if my brilliant, motivated, newly accredited pilot of a husband was still alive, if I’d find him when we reached Alaska since nobody had been able to reach him in the past four days. Wondering if the world had stolen him away from me like it had my father- my father who happened to be in the state for some secret business, no doubt climate related, when the earthquake hit.

“Sen.” Calla has crept up behind me quiet as a whisper, just like Dad used to be. I jump, then take in a breath. “Shh. Look.”

My sister scans the woods, then utters a quiet “oh” after her own inhalation.

“Dad’s favorite bird.”

“Remember his SmartViewer and the album of VPs he had of all the ‘wonders’ that he collected over the years? This definitely would have been one.”

My sister chuckles, and an awkward silence settles between us.

Finally Creepy Owl shifts its wings, and tucked beneath is a tiny owlet, its downy feathers fluffed out in all directions. Calla and I stand in quiet awe, unsure of what to say. Both about the owlet, and about our own current issues.

I’m the first to break our silent streak. “Look, Cal, I’m sorry. It’s just that this whole ordeal has really taken a toll on me. If I had known…”

“You couldn’t have known, Senita. You’re the first person I told. I haven’t even told Yuli.

“We’d been talking a lot about having kids and it’s something I’ve always desperately wanted, and I’ve been so happy but so jealous during your pregnancy and then I decided to go to the doctor and-” She shakes her head, almost as if she’s trying to derail the train of thought.

“When I got the news, I had my chance to cry it out in private. Then I buried it, because I just can’t stand the thought of breaking Yuli’s heart, what with her last traumatic experience with preeclampsia. Not yet, anyway. One broken heart is enough in any relationship, don’t you think?”

I smile sadly, and Calla sighs. “And then when you said what you did, I just felt like I was losing a baby I’d never even had. Like I was losing a baby all over again.”

“Calla, I- I don’t know what to say. It’s not that I don’t want him. But Davix and I never planned to have kids because, well, look around.” She does, and after a moment she understands.

“It was never something on my list, you know? But all that aside, you obviously would have been my first choice for adoptive parents, Cal.”, I say to alleviate some of the hard feelings. “If you two would’ve wanted that, at least.”

Calla stares at me hard, her doe-like hazel eyes bright with emotion as she starts to smile. “I heard a lot of past tense in that baby-related statement, sis.”

I snort, not admitting that she had gotten into my decision-processing brain or that I already had a named picked out. “Well, with you as his mommy or his aunt, it’s no long-shot to assume that he’s going to love the planet… or that he’ll have a flair for the dramatic. Maybe he’ll save the world and all its dying children. Or maybe he’ll be the first to figure out how to terraform Mars. That third crew sure didn’t look so happy in the VPs from their latest data dump, did they?”

Calla chortles, bumping her shoulder into mine. Creepy Owl- who I’ve renamed Mama Owl- hoots, rigid as stone. I’m beginning to think she’s getting tired of us for invading her and her baby’s privacy.

“You know, Dad loved you with every fiber of his being, Senita. And he would have loved your son just as much. I wasn’t going to tell you this but the only reason he was even in Alaska was to try and secure us a safe and operational, used camper that an old friend had offered to sell him just so that we could have a better way of life for the baby. He’d saved up all the money he could to- Senita?” Calla’s voice wavers. She’s scared, and I know it’s because there are fat, ugly tears streaming down my face.

I don’t think she’s seen me cry since Mom died, and she was a baby then.

“I’m okay,” I manage to choke out after a while. “I just… I loved him too, Cal. More than I can say.”

“I know.”

Together we cry into each other’s embrace, and all the emotion that I’ve been holding in about Dad and Davix, combined with everything else over the decades, pours out like a torrential rain. I don’t even know if the owls have stuck around to watch us or not, I’m so overcome.

Once we’ve collected ourselves and our fight seems to be officially over, I smile. “Do you mind just giving me one more minute to myself?” I ask my sister. She shakes her head, and with a final hug, saunters towards the motel.

My hand is rested on the swell in my midsection, and I rub my stomach lovingly. “I think I’m going to name you Seelay, little bean. After your grandpa.”

I look up at the pair of extraordinary birds in front of me, and they stare back. If only I still owned a SmartViewer for the picturesque moment, it would’ve been worth my own album.

The owls finally rise from the branch, and by the looks of it, Baby Owlet has only recently grown into its wings. With a wobble, it flies off, further into the woods. Mama Owl stares after her baby for a moment before taking off in a different direction.

Maybe they were saying goodbye to each other, too.

As I look up to watch her climb through the night sky, I see that the smog has cleared, and moonlight is casting everything in a soft glow. For the first time in a long time, I can see the stars, and it’s really quite beautiful.

If nothing else, it’s a tiny wonder for me to hold on to.

*For you, Nana. You’ll always be a wonder.