Page 11 of The Paradox Club

“Why is Harry Maxwell’s star red?”

“Arcturus is a red giant.”

“What’s a red giant?”

“It’s a very old star, much older than our sun. When it gets old it cools off a little bit, which is why it looks red, but it also expands. Arcturus is about twenty-five times the size of our sun.”

“That’s big.”

“Not really,” said Harry. “It looks big in our sky, because it’s only about thirty-six light-years away. But some red giants get much, much bigger.”

“How big?”

“Hundreds of times bigger than our sun.”

“No wonder they call them giants,” Tess said.

“Our sun will be a red giant one day.”

“Does that mean the sky will turn red?”

“It means there won’t be a sky. The sun will be so big it will probably reach all the way to Earth, and even if it doesn’t it will be close enough to incinerate the entire planet.”

“You mean burn it up?”

“Yes, burn it up.”

“And we’ll all die?” Tess asked, a tremor in her voice.

“None of us will die from a red giant,” Harry said with a chuckle. “It’ll be at least five billion years before that happens.”

“Good,” said Tess, “because I want to know how my book turns out.”

Visions of the sun engulfing the earth kept Tess awake that night, so she crawled onto the window seat and tried to read The Hobbit by the faint light of stars. But the red giant kept pushing Bilbo and his companions out of her head. She didn’t like the idea of Earth burning up, even if she wasn’t living on it anymore. What would happen to the blueberries and the dock and the hammock and the cabin? She felt almost angry at the stars as she stared out the window, so she shifted her gaze from the heavens to the opposite shore of the lake, where the boat landing and the gravel road that led to civilization were mere smudges of charcoal in the starlight. They sometimes went days without seeing a car arrive or a boat depart from the landing, but tonight, Tess saw a pair of headlights, bouncing in the distance—tinier, at first, than many of the stars overhead.

She had never seen anyone drive to the boat landing this late at night, and she watched as the headlights gradually grew and she could just hear the rumble of an engine through the open window across a mile of smooth black lake. She expected the lights to stop moving when they drew level with the landing, but they kept coming toward her. And then their angle changed, and they shone through the water of the lake and the noise of the engine stopped. What had been two distinct lights merged into a faint glow on the surface of the lake, which then faded to near blackness.

Tess was just about to return her eyes to the stars when she suddenly realized what had happened. She leapt to her feet and ran for the front door, hearing its annoying squeak as she pushed her way through and dashed toward the dock. Without the slightest thought for how an eleven-year-old girl would save someone trapped under the lake in a car a mile away across icy water, Tess dove off the end of the dock. The cold water sucked the breath out of her. In the warm waters of late summer, Tess was a fair swimmer; but just this afternoon her toes had gone numb after a few seconds in the lake. A cloud rolled across the moon as she gasped for breath only to find her mouth full of water. Disoriented in the darkness, she couldn’t find her way back to the dock, and the weight of her sodden flannel pajamas pulled her down. Numbness crept through her limbs, and she began to slip below the surface, unable even to tread water. She thought she’d better shout, but then she felt the water covering her mouth, her nose, her eyes. Reality had started to fade and then something pulled her hard and the next thing she knew she was lying on the dock coughing and shivering, Harry panting next to her.

In front of the fire, wrapped in blankets and sipping hot cocoa, her mind slowly surfaced, and she heard her parents and Vivian talking.

“She could have drowned,” said Marie, sniffing.

“She would have drowned,” said Harry, “if I’d gotten there ten seconds later…I can’t even think it.”

“You heard the door?” asked Vivian.

“That damn squeaky door saved her life,” said Harry.

“The door I asked you to oil this afternoon,” said Marie. “Thank God you ignored me.”

“I didn’t ignore you,” said Harry. “I had the can of WD-40 on the counter and then the phone rang, and I forgot about it.”

“Who called?” said Marie.

“Richard.”

A call on the island was a major event. Cell phones didn’t work there, and they often went for a week without hearing the jangling of the landline.