First Light Read online

  FOR MY MOTHER, Deborah,

  whose loving heart could warm

  even the coldest places,

  and for my father, DAVID, TRUE BELIEVER

  GRACEHOPE

  Most boys his age had never touched paper. There was little left. Paper was reserved for fine drawing and important documents. Mattias knew even before he could skate that if he were to harm any of it, if he were to crease one corner of one sheet, the consequences would be serious. But Mattias could not resist his mother's drawing table. He loved the drawers and panels that opened almost without a sound, the bright vials of dye, the immaculate brushes on their small rack, the smooth wooden box of charcoal. And although he was a very obedient boy in almost every other way, he regularly explored the contents of the table when he found himself alone with it. Mattias knew its every measure, including the shape of the black dye stain that had dried inside one drawer before he was born. And each time he approached the table, he expected to find it exactly as he had always found it before.

  Today he found something new.

  It was a thick paper envelope, closed but unsealed, underneath his mother's working sketches. Mattias unwound the string closure slowly, being careful to remember the length that should be left hanging when he tied it again. Inside was a square of paper unlike anything Mattias had ever seen. One side of the square glowed with an image in color, almost as if someone had frozen a moment in time and flattened it, capturing every detail. Even his mother, considered the most talented artist now alive, couldn't create anything like this. Mattias turned it carefully in his hands, holding the square by its sharp corners. It was an image of two women. Sisters, he thought. And there was something else—a glowing blur behind them.

  The sun.

  NEW YORK CITY

  SEVEN YEARS LATER

  A headache, Peter thought as he lay in bed with one arm thrown over his eyes, is something you have to experience to understand. No one can describe a headache to someone who has never had one. He rolled to one side and reached for the little spiral notebook on his night table.

  Peter's mother had gotten headaches for as long as he could remember. They sometimes lasted for days, during which she sat in the red chair next to the pull-out couch where his parents slept. She didn't eat, or laugh, or make the “proper supper” she otherwise insisted upon. Shehardly got up at all. “She's gone away again,” his father would say. “But she'll be back.” It happened maybe twice a year.

  Everyone said how much Peter was like his mother-their skin that was nearly paper white, their all-over freckles, their wavy hair (hers dark, his blond like his father's), even the way they sneezed (always twice), and laughed (very quietly, after one loud sort of bark). So Peter had always assumed that, like his mother, he would get headaches one day, and that, when he did, they would be headaches just like hers.

  Peter paged through the worn notebook. It had his friends' phone numbers in it, and the names of some video games he wanted if his parents ever let him get a video game, and the address of a company in Oregon that sold old radio parts for almost no money, and a bunch of other things. He flipped to the inside back cover, where he had made a series of slashes.

  Just after his twelfth birthday, Peter's mother began asking him whether he had a headache. She had never asked him that before, and he couldn't help thinking it was strange she had to ask at all. Wouldn't it be obvious when he had a headache? Wouldn't he, too, sit in the living room and never smile or get hungry? But she kept asking, every week or two, always smiling carefully, as if she were expecting bad news. So they waited, together.

  Peter got his first headache a few months later. Heknew right away what it was, and three things surprised him about it. First, it lasted only a few hours. Second, although it hurt some, he was able to eat the same salt-and-vinegar potato chips he bought after school every day. Third, he didn't tell his mother about it.

  The only person he told was Miles. He and Miles had been in the same class every year since kindergarten. They knew everything about each other. For instance, Peter knew that Miles only pretended to hate the two stepsisters who lived uptown with Miles's father and stepmother. The truth was that Miles liked them, and that he liked his Monday and Friday nights at his dad's— he liked how the apartment was full of life, with friends coming and going, and teasing at dinner, and the way they always ate oranges and popcorn while they watched TV together.

  And Miles knew that Peter was afraid to tell his mother about his first headache because it had brought him a little closer to knowing what he had already half-known for years: that his mother's headaches were not headaches at all, but something else entirely. Something she didn't want to talk about. Something like sadness.

  Then Peter had more headaches. He took the stub of a pencil from where he had wedged it into the spiral of his little notebook and made a mark next to the others. He counted to himself, slowly.

  His ninth. In a month. He replaced the notebook onthe table and rolled over so he could look through the skylight next to his bed.

  Peter's family lived in two rooms, if you counted the kitchen but not the bathroom. His parents were shown the apartment by mistake—the university where his father taught had it down as a two-bedroom. But his mother had loved it on sight for its high, slanted ceiling and its enormous skylights, saying she wanted to sleep under the stars, even if you couldn't make them out very well in the city. So they had taken it, and made adjustments. One of the adjustments was the pull-out couch his parents used for a bed. Peter's loft was another.

  The loft was a high, carpeted platform that stretched across one end of the living room (Peter's mother always described the living room as “thankfully rather enormous”). Although it was without doubt an uncommon room, Peter's loft held what his father would call “the usual artifacts”: Along with the bed, the desk, and the bookcase, there were three shoe boxes packed with baseball cards, a few stuffed animals, and a collection of old radios, most of which Peter had rebuilt himself, or tried to.

  A waist-high wooden railing looked over the living room below, but there was no ladder: Peter's father had built a flight of narrow steps inside the coat closet. And while Peter could hear anything said loudly from the living room, including “Telephone!” or “Dinner's on,” thepolite thing was to open the closet door and call up the stairs.

  His mother nearly always used the stairs, while his father was more likely to forget and yell out to him from the living room couch. Which was why it surprised Peter, still staring out through the skylight, to hear his mother calling him from the kitchen.

  “Peter?” His mother was English. When she said his name, it sounded like “Pita.”

  Peter rolled to his back and tried to make the sound of someone absorbed in math homework.

  “Daddy called. He's canceling his office hours and coming home early. He has something to tell us. He says it's something big.”

  Peter sat up experimentally. The headache was almost gone now. For a moment he could see a kind of flickering from the corner of his eye, something that disappeared when he turned his head.

  “How big?” he called down. But there was only the sound of water running and dishes clinking together in the kitchen sink.

  Peter's father was a glaciologist. He studied glaciers. Or, as Miles liked to call them, big ice cubes. There were two parts to the job. One part was teaching in New York. Peter knew that side of his father very well: He wore V-neck sweaters with a shirt and tie underneath, had orange juice and seven-grain toast for breakfast every day,and got home by five o'clock, unless it was Wednesday, when he played basketball with some professors. Most nights, Peter could hear him clicking away on his laptop, writing an article about global warming or making notes for a lecture.

  The other part of a
glaciologist's job was fieldwork. Peter's father camped for weeks at a time on arctic ice, where he drove dogsleds and snowmobiles, hoisted himself up frozen walls, and fired flares to scare polar bears away. He had eaten raw seal, ridden in helicopters, and tumbled into deep cracks in the ice. Peter knew this father from stories, most of them told by graduate students who came over for dinner. They were always talking about the time Dr. Solemn had grabbed someone who almost got blown out of an old, doorless helicopter, or the time he fired a rifle over the head of a bear to save one of the dogs. It was a little like living with Clark Kent but never once getting to meet Superman.

  Peter's father arrived home flushed and breathing hard, as if he had run the seven blocks from his office. He held a rolled-up newspaper in one hand, which he used to usher Peter and his mother to the living room couch, bowing theatrically. His forehead practically touched the floor.

  “Oh boy,” said Peter's mother, throwing Peter a look,“it's the queen's footman.” Peter sighed. The more excited his father got, the less able he was to talk normally.

  Peter settled himself next to his mother on the couch while his father dragged the coffee table off to one side so he could stand right in front of them. Center stage. He cleared his throat dramatically.

  Peter groaned. “Can't you just tell us for once?”

  Peter's father smiled and shook his head. “It's a story.”

  “When isn't it a story?”

  Still holding the rolled-up newspaper, Dr. Solemn began.

  “Once upon a time, a good deal north of New York City—in Alaska, actually—the foundation of a very expensive house began to buckle. It was a large house, built over a two-year period by a wealthy philanthropist.”

  He looked quickly at Peter, considering. Then he added, “A philanthropist is someone who gives away a lot of his own money.”

  “I know, Dad.”

  “Of course. My humble apologies.” His father bowed again before continuing:

  “The philanthropist loved his big house, which he called his ‘retreat from the real world.’ He had overseen every detail of its construction—from his mansion in Beverly Hills. He designed a gigantic fireplace for the living room, big enough for a grown man to stand in. Hepicked out the kitchen cabinets and the tile for the bathrooms. He even had a discreet little ‘cell phones off’ sign made out of brass and mounted next to the front door.”

  “Good for him,” said Peter's mother. She hated cell phones.

  “Oh, please,” Peter said, “Dad obviously made that part up.”

  Peter's father ignored them. “The philanthropist stayed in his house exactly once. When he got back to Beverly Hills, his caretaker called to tell him that there was a large depression in the floor of the game room, as if something below had been trying to suck down his custom pool table.”

  Peter's mother made a clucking sound. “How terrible.”

  “Yes,” said Peter's father, nodding, “truly quite terrible. The whole house had to be torn down. The philanthropist didn't even get a chance to show it to any of his friends. Naturally, he sought explanations.”

  “Naturally,” said Peter's mother.

  “Naturally. And the philanthropist was told the strangest thing: It seemed that the foundation of his house had rested on something called the permafrost, and that this permafrost had thawed. The frost was no longer perma, and this, he was told, was the fault of something called global warming.”

  “Global warming?” Peter's mother shook her head. “Don't believe I've ever heard of it.” Peter rolled his eyes,though he was dimly aware that a year ago he would have been playing along.

  “Yes, my dear,” Peter's father said, now speaking as if his wife might be hard of hearing. “Glo-bal warm-ing. The notion that gasses are gathering inside the earth's atmosphere, you know. Warming the planet, melting the ice caps, and generally wreaking havoc with the balance of nature as it now exists.”

  He smiled. “The philanthropist, as it turned out, was quite a reader. And he began to read about global warming. He had heard the phrase before, of course, but he had never given it much thought. The more he read, the more he thought about his wonderful house, and the worse he felt. There had to be some sort of healing process, he decided. Preferably involving a lot of money.”

  “How much money?” Peter asked, trying to cut to the chase.

  “I'm glad you asked,” his father said, unrolling his newspaper and holding it out for them to read.

  It was the university newspaper. Peter read the headline out loud: “Philanthropist Promises University $1.5 Million to Study Global Warming.”

  His mother whistled.

  “Yes,” said Peter's father, in his own voice. “Big money. Part of it will send me back to Greenland with a lot of state-of-the-art equipment. And there will be enough for you two to come with me.”

  Peter's mother stopped smiling. “Come with you?”

  “Six weeks. It's March now. We can leave in April, and we'll be back before the end of May.”

  Peter held his breath. He would climb ice walls. He would drive a dogsled. He might get to meet Superman.

  “Peter has school …” His mother gestured toward Peter, as if his father might have forgotten who he was.

  “I know he does, Rory. But this is worth missing a few weeks of school. And you can write your book up there.”

  His mother groaned and closed her eyes. She hated to be reminded about the book. It was six months late already. Peter's mother was a molecular biologist—a job even harder to explain than a glaciologist's. And her book was about mitochondrial DNA, something even harder to explain than molecular biology.

  Peter's mom opened her eyes and looked up at the skylights. “Why now? Why not next year? Peter will be thirteen next year. …”

  “Things are changing in Greenland, Rory.” His dad was all business now. “More quickly than we expected.”

  His mind was racing, but Peter said nothing. He imagined the three of them playing Monopoly in a cozy tent, a giant bowl of cookies holding down a jackpot of Free Parking cash in the middle of the board. He saw himself being towed on a sled by a bunch of fluffy white dogs. Noschool, his brain chanted. No school, no school, no school.

  “I'm game, Dad.”

  “Great, Pete. I knew you'd be up for it.” His father flashed him a smile, and then looked up as Peter's mom got up and went into the kitchen.

  They ordered pizza, but Peter was the only one who ate it. His parents murmured on the couch, looking at maps and calendars that slowly mounted into a pile on the coffee table.

  Peter called Miles at his dad's house (it was Monday).

  “Whoa,” Miles said when Peter told him what was going on. “Six weeks without Chinese food?”

  “Hadn't thought of that,” Peter said.

  “I could send some down to you, maybe. Special delivery.”

  “Up.”

  “Up what?”

  “Send some up to me—Greenland is north, dope.”

  “Gotcha. I see it right here on Dad's countryball. Very big island.”

  “Let me guess: A countryball is a globe?” Miles was always inventing new names for things. He was writing a whole fake dictionary.

  “Good one, right? So when are you leaving?”

  “I'm not sure. They're still talking about it.”

  “Not tomorrow or anything?”

  “Next month, probably. We can e-mail. Dad always brings a ton of computer stuff.”

  “You won't recognize me when you get back,” Miles said. “I'm gonna start rowing.”

  “Rowing what?”

  “Rowing crew, dummy. Those long boats. It gives you crazy arm muscles.”

  Peter sighed. Miles was suddenly very into working out. He went to the gym three times a week to lift weights.

  “I gotta go,” Miles said. “Family time.”

  “Family time?”

  “Dad bought a bunch of board games. Don't ask. Miles away!” This was Miles's signoff.


  Peter put the phone down and heard his parents' murmuring below him. He still had a sheet of math problems to do. He hunched over the problems. Square roots and exponents; slow going. He wasn't particularly great at math, and at least half his brain was trying to hear his parents' mumbles. Once he made out his father saying, “He is old enough, Rory,” to which his mother responded with a long “Shhhh.”

  Eleven to the third degree. His mind was a blank. Finally, he stood up, flopped onto his bed, and gave himself entirely to the eavesdropping.

  “This is the chance we've been …”

  “… know, but what …”

  “… maybe -ty years? But what if things are moving even faster?”

  While he listened, Peter stared through his skylight at the taller buildings across the street, where windows blinked to life as people came home and turned on their lights. He loved watching the street awaken at night. It was like watching stars emerge.

  The flickering sensation from the afternoon had returned. It flapped quietly at the corner of his eye like a tiny winged insect he could scare away or allow to hover there. He stayed still.

  Across the street, three top-floor windows flamed from black to yellow at the same time. “They must have shared an elevator,” Peter mused. He was getting sleepy.

  And then, as if someone had drawn a curtain, the buildings across the street disappeared, and he was seeing something else, watching as if it were a movie.

  A little boy in pajamas sat on a big bed, cutting his own hair with a large pair of scissors. There was a roll of wrapping paper unfurled on the bed next to him, as if someone had just wrapped a present there.

  The boy was absorbed by his task, his small hand jerking open and closed. The scissors looked sharp, and the boy seemed oblivious to the fact that he was coming very close to slicing off his ear. He couldn't have been older than four.

  Then a woman appeared next to the bed in a robe,toweling her wet hair with one hand. She took a moment to grasp what was going on, and then she shouted— silently, for Peter realized he could hear nothing at all— and grabbed the scissors from the boy's hand.