FISSION

Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1945

Night was the dangerous time.

The whine of a distant propeller sliced through her dreams, and Claire jerked awake to the knowledge of judgment. She saw showers of bombs coughed from tin bellies. In the air before her, they spilled in loose waves.

The iron bed squeaked as she rose from her pillow. Her husband groaned and turned in the sheets. Claire watched his thick body. If he found her there, sitting, pregnant and still, he would scold her, tell her to rest and be more careful. He wouldn’t be responsible if she made herself sick.

She stood, tottered, gripped her lean hips. The child twitched inside her. In the chalky moonlight, feet scraping the splintered planks, Claire staggered to the far window. Drapes of opaque plastic hung from thin nails. The bodies of flies clung in the folds.

It had been many months since the day Richard found soot from the laundry smokestack streaking the bedroom walls. Enraged, he’d dragged in a ladder and a long plastic sheet. Now, at the peak of summer, the sheet had split and curled inward. Claire dipped her hand through the tall scissored crack.

She pulled one flap aside, peered through the glass. Outside, the world glowed white. Overturned ash cans littered the stubbled yard. Her good dress turned on the line. Where the dirt dipped away and sloped under the road, fence posts leaned through weeds. Twelve other cottages stood dark on the hills.

From this remote block she could not see the complex where for months she’d typed pages of numbers—but she knew just where it lay. None of the girls there spoke about the secrets their husbands knew.

Claire raised her eyes, drew in a soft breath. A full moon swelled among the stars. An airplane crossed its pocked face.

Back home in Virginia, on a stump near the creek, her father preached of birds changed into machines. They haunted, he’d said, the very fields they rose from. He stood like a jackknife plunged in the wood. His bony arms jerked before him. Sprawled on a quilt with her chin in her hands, Claire pinched sawgrass between her toes. The bright water lapped in the stream.

Claire closed the plastic curtain, fingered its crinkled edge, then touched her hand to her stomach.

She turned from the window, tugged back her thin hair. Moonlight spilled across her shoulders. Claire watched as her crooked shadow fell over the tangled bed, dropped to the floor on the far side, then slanted against the leg of Richard’s empty bureau. Square knobs studded the heavy drawers. Cobwebs laced its frame.

When they’d pulled to the gate at the edge of the complex and Richard sat gripping the slender wheel, the soldier who’d checked their passes squinted into the open trunk. The bureau lay roped down inside. With the soldier at his window, Richard calmly explained how he’d once built such furniture with his father. The soldier nodded, stepped back behind the post, then swept his open hand through the air. Richard stamped down on the gas pedal. The tires threw spinning red clouds.

Now they’d been living here almost a year—and Richard never touched the bureau. It stood against the wall where he’d shoved it that day, monstrous and powdered with dust.

She lifted the hem of her gauzy nightgown, inched her way toward the door. A loose board creaked beneath her. In the patchy darkness she could just see Richard’s arm angled away from his body and his hand, big as a tractor seat, cupped under her flimsy pillow. His breathing rattled in her ears.

Claire ran her fingers over the curved iron rail, crept on her toes around the bed. A sharp kick struck her inside. Sour acid rose to her throat. She approached the giant bureau, blew across its top. She watched the motes swirl in the stillness.

On the lip of the corner opposite, beneath rags of web and powder, a silver brooch glinted. Three diamonds shone along its loops.

At the dance in Johnson City, as the dresses churned inside the steaming hall, Claire stood frozen, clutching her buttoned blouse. The silver brooch knocked against her skin. On a wooden platform at the end of the room, Richard shouted calls through a long tin cone. Fiddle bows leapt behind him. Claire floated out through the cantering figures, squeezed her arms close to her chest. Richard’s leg jumped as he chanted. The floor seemed to tilt, then soften like sand. Claire felt her cold bones tremble. Her body fell forward—she lunged for the stage. Richard’s heel pounded and pounded. When she lifted her eyes from the floor where she lay, she saw Richard’s red face glisten. His pointed boot sparkled, then dropped.

Richard moaned in his sleep. Claire turned to face the dark doorway.

In the blankness of the kitchen, blue spirals tumbled and wheeled. Hollow wind raised a slow roar. As she crossed the bare threshold, the door frame dissolved. Tarpaper rolled across the moon. Then the floor rose below like a ramp to her feet. Long shadows cleaved the grained boards. The oil stove crouched against the wall. Its plated door hung open on blackened elbow hinges. Iron pipes sprang from its back.

When Richard’s mother flapped her dish towel in the sunny ranch house in Texas, Claire slid her arms into the mouth of the glowing oven. A wrinkled roast sweated on the rack. She gripped the pan’s rim in the folds of her apron, drew the meat out toward her body. Richard’s mother gasped and blushed deeply. Claire smelled the steam leaking from the darkened loaf.

Later, as they sat at their places around the veined walnut table, Richard stood by his chair skimming a knife blade along his thumb. His mother warned him to be careful. Then he punctured the roast, sawed the knife down its middle. He peeled the halves apart with his fingers. He carved a thick chunk, brought it up on his fork. Claire held her plate out to catch it.

A muffled cry reached her from the bedroom. Claire tipped her head back to listen.

On the wall above the sink at the far end of the kitchen, a jagged mirror tilted on a wire. Its hard edges burned with blue light. Claire took a step toward the bright swirling glass, swept her hands out through the darkness. The curled baby lurched against her spine.

Then it seemed that the air folded gently around her. She felt her ribs swell with hot blood. She braced against the sink, pushed her nose toward the mirror. She watched a woman rise through the fog. She’d never before seen the face that emerged there, withered and trembling and pale. But in the pupil of her eye a hooded lantern swung, pulled Claire’s gaze to its flame. A chalky hand clutched the looped bail. Silver nets flapped in the background. Soon the hand sank and her mother floated forward, cast a glance out at her daughter. She drew the lamp away and vanished. Then, by the light of the speckled globe, Claire saw her again, pacing the porch of the farm house. Sheets of rain soaked the bare platform. Her mother’s dress snapped in the storm.

When a cloud bank flashed above her and thunder roared across the flickering hills, her mother slipped and crumpled against a post. Her forehead struck the knotted wood. A stripe of blood smeared her sunken cheek. Through the rippled parlor window where she crouched stroking a burlap doll, Claire watched her mother sob against the rail. She saw her rip her hair back, lift her stony face, then sing out, wrap one arm fiercely around the post, and with the other thrust her lantern further into the roiling night.

Claire blinked and nodded to the mirror. At its upper edge the bathtub curved between shadows.

She could not tell what held her then, what current crackled the boiling air. She could not name the sudden steady pulsing. Waves of smoldered cinder seemed to pour in through her skin, made the air blaze bright with flitting fire. Her legs flexed taut and shivered, then fell numb. Her toe tips brushed the gritty floor. As she lifted toward the ceiling, borne aloft on her arching back, she felt the walls turn cold and streak with moisture. A piercing whistle quavered in her ears. Cork panels descended, squares upon squares. She rose and watched their surfaces grow sharper.

On the night that Richard called her to the bedroom where he stood, his skin looked scaled from working in the lab. He ran his broad hands over his naked chest. Claire swallowed hard, knelt down against the bed. She felt him stepping heavily behind her. He clutched her by the hips, thrust himself between her thighs. The pain came quick and sharper than she’d feared. And her head filled full of raging flames blown down from the sky. A child looked up and a mother wept and a raven pecked their eyes. One day the sun will burst, it cried, and shook its heavy wings. But you’ll never know that I’m the one who poisoned all the kings. Richard shuddered inside her. Claire coughed yellow liquid onto the dull twisted sheets.

By a blackberry thicket near the lake in Virginia, her mother scattered birdseed from a round woven basket. Claire sat warm and laughing in a tree. Her mother’s hair blew bright in the summer afternoon, and a cloud of robins swarmed above her head. Claire called out and pointed to the sky. Her mother smiled, sank her fist into the brimming basket, cast her eyes upward, then flung a spray of seeds into the air with a graceful snap of her muscled arm. The seeds sailed high above the hilltops, hung motionless in the sun, then dropped, one by one, into the pasture. A gust of cool wind flattened the grass blades. Oak leaves turned their veiny undersides.

When Richard led her sternly through the physics lab in Houston, he told her how his father still haunted those very rooms. His voice filled every lecture hall they passed. Richard pumped his arms and mumbled curses through his teeth. Below a glass sheet in the vaulted marble atrium, photographs of Richard’s father shaking hands with famous men lay mounted in golden frames. Richard stared hard at the neatly typed captions, shook his head, and sighed.

Claire gasped and watched silver sparks pour toward her in the dark. The ceiling clapped shut and silence fell and Claire dropped backward through the room. She plunged headfirst into the tub. Her arm struck the faucet, unleashed blasts of cold water. She felt her swollen body split.

In a blossom of fire at the edge of Claire’s vision, a child’s head swam in thick blood.

“Richard!” she cried. “Richard!”