“I’m having your mom the attorney call next time. That pamphlet didn’t say anything about dumping waste on the lawn. Might be time to get litigious.”
Gabe regarded his sister with scornful curiosity. “Alison, do you just not even care about a spaceship in your backyard? That might even be worse than hating it.”
“I care. But it gives me the creeps sometimes.”
“The creeps about what?”
“That someone’s watching us in there.”
“Really? You’re still worrying about that? There’s no evidence for that.”
“Well, there’s no evidence against it either. I don’t know. One minute it wasn’t here, and then the next it is and now everything’s totally different. Like what would we be doing right now if it weren’t here? I want to go back to that.”
Gabe didn’t agree aloud, but he admitted to himself that she had a point. The spaceship, on some level, always occupied his mind, never totally forgotten about, its image flashing when he wandered the hallways at school or rode his bike. He’d brought some of his classmates over, including kids he’d barely spoken to before, to gawk at it and ask questions like “What if the aliens are having sex in there right now?” and comments like “My dog would totally pee on its legs.” The attention thrilled and exhausted him.
The teachers were curious too. Desperate to capitalize on the excitement, his English teacher turned it into an assignment for the class. “I want you guys to write a paper about how the main characters of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston and Julia, would react to a spaceship suddenly landing at Airstrip One,” Mr. Levin said. “Would it frighten them? Give them hope? What would be their reaction?”
Kerry, a pretty girl in the front row, raised her hand.
“Does the spaceship look exactly like the one at Gabe’s house?” she asked, looking at Gabe and smiling.
In the kitchen’s junk drawer, beneath a detritus of pens, tape measures, paper clips, and solar calculators, Ernest found an old notebook. He flipped to a fresh page, speaking out loud as he wrote: “September 12:11:40 A.M., ship pukes out green liquid, approximately 10 gallons, onto the lawn.”
He delivered the notebook to Gabe. “I want you to be the primary keeper of the log.”
Ernest didn’t bother explaining his rationale and Gabe didn’t press.
“No problem.”
“Daily posts. You can be the one to keep track of how it trashes our lawn and reduces your hearing every night. How’s that tinnitus, by the way?”
“It’s nothing,” Gabe said, before adding in a goofy rapper voice, “I’m going to murder this notebook like it was the SATs.”
Alison laughed. “Yeah, dawg.”
“You too, Alison,” Ernest said. “I have a feeling you might be a less biased witness than Dr. Dre over here. Write down all the creepy things he won’t write down.”
“That’s encouraging sibling rivalry, Dad. Are you and Mom going to contribute too?”
“Of course.”
“How about Athena?” Alison pointed to their white cat, resting in a sunny spot on the floor. “We all have to do our part.”
“She’s off the hook for now. She doesn’t like the spaceship either.”
Ernest walked to the window. Traces of the neon-green sludge were still visible, but most of it seemed to have already sunk in, working its way through the dirt and the tiny roots that carried nutrients into the central part of the grass. He wondered what would kill the grass first—the sludge or the oncoming winter?
6
“Honey, I’m sorry, but I only have a few minutes.”
“I want to run an idea by you.”
Cynthia worked in an unglamorous office at a desk that was always buried in sedimentary paperwork. At thirty-nine, she was one of the few lawyers in a small Chicago law firm that specialized in environmental law and civic government cases. She had the phone crunched on her shoulder while her hands dug through an especially unruly file, spilling over with affidavits and reports.
“At last night’s meeting, we realized that we’re short on budget. Even with what town hall’s giving us, we’re not going to make our goals. We don’t want to pull back on the plans but we’ve got to raise money in other ways. Creative, homespun ways that aren’t going to rely on corporate sponsorship.”
“What’s wrong with corporate sponsorship?”
“We don’t need yet another partner telling us what to do and how to do it. We need money with no strings attached, given from the goodness of one’s heart.”
“Oh, I see where this is going.”
“Do you?”
“You’re talking about torturing our children.”
“Torture! I’m talking about building character.”
“Everyone knows that ‘building character’ means doing something you don’t want to do.”
“I want them to go down to the mall and collect money from the small business owners.”
“Babe, really? How much money will they get from that? A few hundred bucks, tops?”
“We’re always emphasizing to them the importance of working for their values. And who wouldn’t want to give them money? It’s sweet, these two kids collecting donations for an Earth Day celebration.”
“I love them, Ernest, but I don’t know if they can play the cute card anymore.”
“Sure they can.”
“How did this come about?”
Ernest recounted that after the budget had been revealed, he quickly volunteered to raise money. Or more specifically, his children. After all, they were old hands at fund-raising. One year, they’d raised a whopping $168 for a beach cleanup—spent on trash bags, recycling bins, and a humble lunch for all the volunteers. They were little kids then—Gabe, barely ten years old, dressed in a suit, and Alison, eight, wiggling a loose eyetooth and smearing the extra blood on her peach dress. Ernest parked them in front of the local bank, where they kicked their legs out underneath a folding card table. From across the street, he kept an eye on them; he knew they’d get more without him there fouling the scene. “Look for people with nice things,” he said. “Leather coats and jackets, big jewelry. Call to them, ‘Would you like to save the environment?’”
His strategy was all about leading by example. He thought if he volunteered his kids, as the director of the Earth Day committee, then all the other members would follow suit. But his prime targets—Jean, Ross and Marcy, all of whom had children around Gabe and Alison’s age—didn’t seem to bite. Jean said something about Leigh having too many commitments this year already—debate team, gymnastics. Ernest pushed the issue but was politely stonewalled.
Cynthia said, “Why don’t I ask Stephen if he’ll contribute?”
“Oh, Stephen. I don’t know.”
Stephen was the head of Cynthia’s law film, a strapping environmentalist whom Ernest always imagined riding a chestnut horse to work instead of a low-emissions car.
“You’ll get a sizable sum at once instead of nickels and dimes from people at the mall.”
“But he’s going to want the firm’s name on something.”
“Of course he will, but what’s wrong with that? Just list the name with Demeter and