I'm only beginning to understand the pressure my mom was subjected to at the hands of the oh-so-powerful Department of Energy-the DOE-and why those last few weeks she had baggy circles under her red eyes, working long hours into the night on the edge of a breakthrough discovery.
I took a week off school. I'm not sure what was worse-having neighbors and former colleagues of my mom drop off casseroles and angel food cakes, mumbling condolences and patting my hair, (a gesture I really hate, by the way). Or walking through the school hallway and seeing eyes lock on to me as if I had the plague.
Even the stupidest high school kid had heard of the work my mother was doing at GNL-the Greenfield National Laboratory-a facility that employed most of their parents. Her scientific breakthrough in identifying a stellar subspace energy source was big news. Developing new sources of energy to save the country, if not the world-or so the propaganda goes.
Like something out of those ancient 2-D Star Trek shows. I've heard enough "beam me up, Scotty" jokes to make me puke. Nevertheless, a goodly number of Greenfield High students feel some measure of pride in knowing their school produced Nobel Prize-winning scientist Carol Harrison.
I'm guessing that, in my teachers' estimations, I wilt in my mother's shadow. Their expectations of me are nothing less than colossal. But I try to hold my own. I'm president of the Chem Club, have unlimited access to the lab at school, and I even get to bore my fellow students with those mind-boggling abstracts pertaining to experiments they have no clue about. Maybe these small-town educators feel some strange need to groom me as the star pupil, so that as they send me off to Harvard or MIT or Yale, I would make Greenfield High proud once more. Someday the principal would post my photograph and bio alongside my mother's on the hall bulletin board outside the attendance office. Whoopee. And no doubt someone would put some corny line up on the sidewalk marquis the last week of school, like, "Go Bria, class of 2057! GHS girl rocks the world!"
But now? Do you really think I could care less about getting into some posh Ivy League school? That my future career plans matter in the least? All I know is I still have one more agonizing year of high school to finish and then I have to face the rest of my life. Without Mom.
I look at the clock as I sit at the kitchen table, listening to Dylan roll a ball against his bedroom wall. Thump, thump. It's 2:43 in the afternoon and I've done nothing more than mope around the house all day. The rhythm of his thumping is precise; I watch the second hand on the old-fashioned wall clock and Dylan matches its measured path around the numbers, beat for beat. One month exactly since the accident. And in three minutes, to the minute, according to the official report released by GNL's public relations team. The brief, sterilized announcement rings in my head. Carol Harrison, prominent scientist, along with her team of fifteen coworkers, died this afternoon in a tragic accident at Greenfield National Laboratory.