“Okay. My turn,” Caroline said, her eyes sparkling with excitement and the unspoken words that said he’d better hand over the binoculars.
Teddy reluctantly gave them up, but instead of joining Frank and Oscar at the card table, he took Eleanor’s place against the wall next to Bunny. She didn’t even look up from her book as he sank down next to her. Strange girl, Teddy thought. She reminded him a little of the actress Audrey Hepburn with her brown pixie cut and the way she usually dressed in all black. It was probably the style in New York, but here it made her stand out like a sore thumb.
Teddy wondered why the heck she had even joined the club. She barely spoke to them when she was there. Always reading her mystery novels. He could tell she felt above them—especially John and Teddy. But he still checked out her legs, bare because she’d rolled her denim jeans almost all the way to her knees.
He looked up and saw Bunny watching him. She flashed him a strange, knowing smile.
“Hi, Teddy,” she said. “See anything interesting?”
“Nope,” he said, knowing that she didn’t just mean in the sky.
Bunny laughed and returned to her book, A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie.
Teddy picked up the magazine Eleanor had been reading. His eyes lingered on the cover, on Marilyn’s bare shoulders, her cleavage where it dipped into the white dress, before catching the title of an article in the right-hand corner, “There Is a Case for Interplanetary Saucers.”
Teddy grunted. He read the date at the bottom, April 7, 1952, a couple months old already. It wouldn’t have the story about what happened in Washington, D.C., last month. Teddy only knew about that because Frank and Oscar had come running at him with The Washington Post and the headline “‘Saucer’ Outran Jet, Pilot Reveals.” They insisted this was the start of an invasion from Mars.
Frank and Oscar had joined the Skywatch club because they wanted to be part of something bigger, sure, but also because of their belief in extraterrestrials. They read everything they could get their hands on about them—from Amazing Stories to books, like the one they’d brought to the tower the other day, The Day of the Triffids. Something about giant human-eating alien plants.
Teddy was too pragmatic for aliens. Whatever objects were in the sky, he doubted they were flying saucers. They were probably military. The only invasion they’d have to worry about would be man-made.
He said as much to the guys, but they wouldn’t hear it.
Still, the title of the article and the interplanetary reference made him curious, and with Caroline as the lookout now, there wasn’t much else to do. So Teddy opened the magazine to the table of contents, turned to the corresponding page, and began reading.
2
CAROLINE
Caroline tracked the vapors still staining the sky. The strands looked to her like worms wiggling across the sky. She wished she had been the one to spot the plane. Teddy wasn’t as diligent as her, so she didn’t think it was fair. Caroline understood that it only took a second to miss the most important moments. A second and everything could change forever.
It was an easy job. All anyone needed was patience and a good eye. Which is why, if she had her way, it would just be the girls. She would ditch Bunny, though, who was nothing more than a stuck-up, spoiled East Coast girl. Caroline didn’t know why she stayed in the group. Most of the time she rolled her eyes and acted aloof. Caroline almost told their advisor Mr. Smith about it, but she didn’t want to cause trouble. So she ignored Bunny right back.
When Caroline first heard about Operation Skywatch, she joined right away. Her father had been a pilot in World War II and had died in a battle on Anzio Beach. There were two pictures of him on her nightstand. One of him in his uniform, handsome with his dark hair and eyes. The other was of him smiling with his thumbs up in the cockpit of his plane. She didn’t remember much about her father, only small images and feelings. The most vivid was when she was three years old, sitting on his lap in a truck and holding the steering wheel. His hands rested on top of hers at ten and two. She remembered how heavy and strong they felt.
Caroline was a patriot, like her father before her. Joining the club was not just a chance for her to feel like she was doing something in the fight against the Reds, but a way for her to connect to her dad. She didn’t tell that to her stepdad, Charlie, who was a good man and, truthfully, the only father she had ever really known. He married her mother when Caroline was eight. Caroline didn’t talk about her dad a whole lot. Her mother already had enough ghosts to contend with; she didn’t want to give her anything more concrete. Plus, she felt like she owed Charlie the courtesy, too.
Charlie pastored the small Methodist church in town, which meant that Caroline was a pastor’s kid, or PK for short. She didn’t mind it really, except for the teasing that sometimes followed. The “oh, you’re such a good girl” pressure she felt from the weight of a title she hadn’t chosen. The pressure to perform the role got to her every now and then, especially recently. It’s probably why she lied and said she was staying over at a friend’s, but in reality, snuck out and went down by the water to drink cheap beer with some of the other kids on Saturday nights.
When she wasn’t with friends or on shift at the Skywatch club, Caroline cleaned the pews, floor, and bathroom of the church. She saved every bit of money Charlie paid her. When she graduated, she wanted to leave, to take a bus somewhere—maybe all the way to Los Angeles. People always said how pretty she was. As pretty as Marilyn Monroe, they said, though Caroline didn’t have the same curves. But at least Caroline was a natural blonde. She’d read somewhere that Ms. Monroe dyed her hair. She could have been crowned Miss Butterfly too, if they’d still had the pageant this year during the beautiful Festival of Lanterns. Her favorite part was when they put the lights in the water and she watched them float away. She could be like one of those little lights, just wading and slowly backing away from the shore until she was gone.
Caroline was smart. Her calculus teacher, who was from Boston, wanted her to pursue a field in mathematics, calling it the only pure discipline. Besides, he’d say, they needed more female mathematicians. Math came easy for her, but Caroline didn’t stare into the long corridor of her future and see herself with numbers and equations. And as far as jobs went, all she saw for women and mathematics were the ads in the paper for computer programmers. She didn’t want to become a human calculator stuck in a small office space all day.
It wasn’t that Monterey was a bad place to grow up, but she felt that if she didn’t leave, she would suffocate. She needed to get out of the house and away from her mother. Her mother, who had become so wracked with grief over the death of her little brother Jack last year, that she didn’t even go outside anymore.
At first, the women in the neighborhood had come by and brought meals. They sat with her mother, speaking in soft, encouraging tones. They listened. They prayed with her. But as the weeks became months, her mother retreated to somewhere deep inside herself. The neighbors stopped visiting. Only Caroline and Charlie were left. They were trapped inside the house with a woman who no longer resembled the person she’d been. She moved about like a small moth, hovering and fluttering with no purpose. Her light had gone.