THE SECOND DAY of class was even more intense than the first. They weren’t expecting Luka and me to be on the same level as the rest of the crew, of course—but Luka seemed to be keeping up just fine. I was the only one floundering.
These were basic, general concepts I needed to know. It’d be irresponsible of NASA to send us unprepared into space. But these were only basic, general concepts for someone who’d already earned a degree or two. Not a rising high school senior.
Now that I was getting to know Luka a little better, I couldn’t blame him for being perfect for this place. Not only did he absorb the information more readily, he even got along more easily with the other astronauts.
My own experience with making friends started and ended with Mitsuko and Emilio. And these four were not only astronauts, but our former instructors. I could hardly remember what words were in their presence, much less talk to them as if we were equal.
At the end of the second day, I was heading back to my room after an unsuccessful attempt to outrun my stress on the track when I intercepted Luka in the quiet hallway off the cafeteria.
He wasn’t dressed for running. But when he saw me, he smiled. And a little knot in my chest started to loosen. “Feeling better yet?”
I swiped a sweaty lock of hair away from my brow. “Actually, no. Running lets me forget a little while, that’s all.”
He cocked his head toward the direction he’d been heading. “Would you like to join me?”
“Where are you headed?”
“Follow and see.”
At the end of an abandoned hall was a carved oak door completely unlike the industrial metal-and-glass ones everywhere else on the compound. He opened the door for me and I stepped inside, not knowing what to expect.
It was a chapel. Small, narrow, barely wider than a janitor’s closet. A few rows of decoratively carved wooden pews led up to an altar, over which a half circle of stained glass bled a rainbow mosaic of color on the floor. It was empty of people and mostly bare of decoration, save for a low cabinet covered by a drape behind the pew. A soft scent of roses and the deep, earthy aroma of polished wood permeated the air.
It was the most aesthetically pleasing place I’d seen in the entire compound. More knots in my chest and stomach began to ease. It somehow felt easier to breathe, like an iron band that had encircled my ribs was now gone. My hand went to the curved spiral decoration carved into the end of the pew, tracing its round shape, feeling the slippery-smooth polished wood beneath my fingertips.
Something that sounded suspiciously like Christmas hymns played on an old speaker at such quiet volume that you had to sit completely still to hear it. Had we missed Thanksgiving, or was someone here a little overeager for Christmas?
“I didn’t know we had a chapel,” I whispered. Whispering seemed appropriate in a place like this.
He motioned me into the pew and sat beside me, leaving a polite space between us. “I come here sometimes,” he said, his voice quiet. “It’s calming.”
It struck me as odd that I had never considered Luka being religious. “Catholic?”
“Georgia has its own orthodox church,” he said, a bit of smile in his voice at my ignorance.
“Oh.”
He craned his head a little to smile at me, and then looked up at the stained-glass window. “It’s not all that different. To me. So many names to worship the same God.”
I nodded, my breath catching in my throat. I’d joked about Ganesh and Ram, but in reality I didn’t put much stock in the Hindu pantheon. They were stories from my childhood, little symbols sprinkled through my house, a thread connecting me to my history. Not my present.
“My grandma’s Hindu,” I said, venturing out into the subject like an ice-skater on the rink. “The rest of my family is basically agnostic. We still celebrate Christmas like most people do. My mom puts up a little nativity scene on the fireplace mantel for when her sisters come over. And every year, we catch my grandma sneaking a blue figurine of infant Krishna as a substitute for the baby Jesus.”
Luka smiled. He really was handsome up close, with eyes that looked like they understood everything they saw, a sheen of blond stubble on his square jaw. The soft light from the stained glass gave him an ethereal glow. “So what is it that you believe?”
My lips parted, but nothing came out.
I’d never thought too much about it. I figured if there was a God, he was kind of like the moon: up there watching, possibly affecting life on Earth in subtle ways—but otherwise something that I would never fully understand or see up close.
“You miss your family?” I asked, changing the subject.
Luka turned away from me again, bowed his head. For a long time I thought he was going to ignore me. “I’ve never been away from them for so long.”
“Me neither.” Thinking of them was like a physical pain in my stomach.
“It’s odd, isn’t it? To be so far from home, surrounded by strangers. To feel like an outsider.” His eyes went far away and I wondered what he was talking about. He looked like any other white American kid, and he hardly had an accent. What reason could he have to feel like an outsider, either here or back where he came from?
I stayed quiet, unsure if it was ruder to ask him about it or not ask him.
In the quiet that followed, my eyes alighted on the draped cabinet beside the altar. It suddenly hit me, the familiarity of its shape.
Forgetting myself, I jumped to my feet, lifting the drape to see if I was correct. I was rewarded with the polished walnut gleam of an upright piano. It was an old one, and cheap, but when I lifted the lid the expanse of black and white ivories still made my heart dance like fingers on the keys.
The bench had been pushed underneath the key bed. I brought it out a little with my toe and sat, fingertips grazing the cool surface of the keys.
I turned back around to Luka, unable to keep the smile from my face. “I haven’t touched a piano in months. Do you mind?”
He nodded politely. “Please, go ahead.”
I touched the first key experimentally, and a rich, satisfying tenor note broke the solemn silence of the chapel, hanging in the air a few seconds before reverberating into nothing. My fingers, remembering their old patterns, played a few notes in a made-up melody, getting back into the feel of it. I started playing snatches of some melancholy waltz whose name I couldn’t recall. It felt good, and proper, like stretching after a long flight.
I snuck a look over my shoulder at Luka. He’d closed his eyes, leaned forward over his knees, fists against his mouth. Sad? Or tired, maybe? I couldn’t tell if he enjoyed the tune or not.
Then I hit a sour note and pulled my hands into my lap like it had bitten me. “It’s a little out of tune,” I said sheepishly.
He opened his eyes. “Sad melody.”
I shrugged a shoulder. Then I put my hands back onto the keys, because now that they’d had a taste, my fingers were itching for more. I began “Clair de lune,” a sentimental favorite that pretty much everyone in the world recognized.
The familiar calm descended on me. Even though I could play this blindfolded and probably in my sleep, the mental exercise and the music itself always put me in kind of a trance.
I stopped. Luka had been having so much trouble getting into the semiconscious state lately. He hadn’t made any progress. Maybe music could do for him what it did for me. If it could help, even a little, I owed it to him to at least try.
“Hey, come here,” I said.
His eyebrows knitted momentarily, but he complied, getting up from the pew and then sliding onto the narrow bench beside me.
“This is how I get into the right mental state,” I said. “For the EEG tests. I play music in my head—pretend like I’m playing piano. Maybe it could work the same for you. Here.” I grabbed his balled-up hands without thinking, and smoothed his palms out.
“I don’t know how to play,” he protested.
“You can’t get in the right place mentally if you’re tense. Just relax.” My fingers released his and found their former places over the keys. “Close your eyes. Don’t think about anything else. Concentrate on the music.”
I started “Clair de lune” again, taking it half as fast as I normally would and hoping he didn’t notice the sharp, off-key middle C too much. That was a good, generically tranquil piece, at least in the first movement.
I watched his profile as I played. With his eyes closed, he was an open and up-close study. I watched the blond tips of his eyelashes flutter, wondering what was going on behind those eyelids. I felt the air move in and out of his chest in a steady rhythm. Let my eyes take in the finer details of his face: the stubble on his cheek, the texture of his skin, the planes of his cheekbones. It was impossible to tell if my plan was working.
I stopped at the end of the slow first movement, and observed as his eyes opened.
“Well?” I asked.
He took in a long breath and let it out. “It is something I will have to work on. But thank you for trying. I can see how this method works for you.”
“Sure.” My hands slipped from the keys, though my fingers still itched to finish the piece. “What do you say we . . . practice? If you want, I mean. I miss playing, and if it helps you . . .”
I was close enough to see that his smile was more for my benefit; he didn’t think the piano playing would help. “Thank you. That would be nice.”
The silence filled with the distant, generic babbling of Christmas music again.
Luka shook his head, smiling ruefully. “Americans play Christmas music far too early in the season. And the songs are different from those at home. But I like it.”
“Me too.” I nodded, leaned back on my hands. “Even though it’s cheesy. It’s so . . . I don’t know. Hopeful.”
One corner of his mouth perked up in one of the first genuine smiles I’d seen on him. We sat next to each other, our legs touching, listening to the rise and fall of the verses until they faded away.
“Thank you, Cassie,” he said, his voice so low and sweet in my ear that I couldn’t look at him. “I will try your method next time. Perhaps it will help.”
I bit back a smile, savoring the warm glow in my chest that was starting to burn off the chill of loneliness. “It was purely selfish. I just wanted an excuse to show off my musical skills.”