172 Hours on the Moon Read online

  Seriously? Midori thought. How melodramatic is this going to get? “Mom, he’s not missing. He just went to ask for directions. What’s wrong is all this yelling. Can’t you see that people are staring at us like we’re insane? Listen, he’ll be back in ten minutes. I guarantee it. And if he’s not, fine, we’ll have them page him over the PA system. Okay?”

  Her mother nodded weakly and pretended to calm down a little.

  “I’m going to go to the bathroom now, is that okay? It’s right over there,” Midori said, pointing to a sign at the other end of the hall. “Just wait here. I’ll be back in three minutes.”

  “Do you really have to go right now, Midori? Shouldn’t we wait here until your father comes back?”

  Midori stared at her blankly. “I have to go now. Not in ten minutes. In ten minutes I won’t have to go to the bathroom anymore. Do you get what I’m saying?”

  Without waiting for her mother’s response, Midori started walking toward the restrooms.

  * * *

  It didn’t look as though anyone had been in there for a while. No drops of water in the sink from people who’d recently washed their hands. No little bits of paper towel that had landed outside the trash. Only the door of the fourth stall was closed. Midori picked the second one and went in. She listened to the murmur of the air conditioner, which got her thinking about the sounds on the moon. There weren’t any, as far as she knew. No air for sound to travel through. It was impossible to imagine. For her entire life she’d been surrounded by sounds. People talking, traffic noise, the wind … Would the total absence of sound feel claustrophobic?

  For some reason, that made her think about the other occupied stall at the end. She hadn’t heard a thing from there since she came in. Not so much as a shuffle of feet or a throat clearing. As she went to the sink to wash her hands, she instinctively leaned down to check if there was someone in the stall. At first glance it appeared to be empty. But when she leaned over a little farther, she saw two shoes. Feet.

  There is someone in there.

  There were hundreds of reasons someone might sit in the bathroom for a long time at an airport. If you were afraid of flying, for example. Or just needed a little time to yourself. But … no one, absolutely no one, sits there so perfectly quietly for so long.

  Without really thinking about it, Midori suddenly knocked softly on the stall door. “Hello?”

  No one answered.

  She knocked again, just as softly this time.

  “Excuse me, is anyone in here? Is everything all right?”

  But there was no response.

  Midori knocked a third time, a little harder now.

  “Hello? Miss?”

  Suddenly it struck her: What if the person was dead and there was a corpse sitting in there behind the door? Horrible images flickered over her retinas: a dead woman, her mouth open, her face white, with blood running out of the corner of one eye, staring at her. A millipede crawling out of her nose and making its way down into her blouse, where it disappeared into a brownish black gaping hole in her chest.

  But the person wasn’t dead. There was someone in there who now took a long, slow breath.

  Right then Midori remembered something unsettling. Way back in elementary school, her classmate Kaname had started a rumor. One of the stalls in the girls’ bathroom at her old school had been closed for several weeks, presumably because one of the older girls had thrown something in the toilet and thoroughly clogged the narrow pipes. Kaname had told Midori and her friends that the out of order sign hanging on the door was just a cover, something the teachers had decided to hang up to make sure that no one tried to open the door. Actually, Kaname had said, the truth is that someone’s in there. He paused a long, long time for dramatic effect before concluding: Her name is Hanako-chan.

  That’s all he would say. They pressed him as hard as they could, but Kaname just shook his head, and Midori thought she remembered him looking scared. It wasn’t until a week later that he agreed to tell them the rest. Hanako-chan, he began, isn’t alive, but she lives in the bathroom. Do you get it? Midori thought she understood. And if you knock on the door and say her name two times, she’ll answer you with a “yes?” She’ll ask if you want to play with her. And then … she’ll open the door….

  Of course, the whole thing was a silly story from a little boy’s imagination. But still, by the end of that week, none of the girls were using the school bathrooms anymore. They held it until they got home or snuck off school grounds and went over to use the bathrooms at the nearby train station. In the end, there were so many problems with students whose bladders were so full they couldn’t concentrate that the principal was forced to get the toilet fixed and then personally take down the out of order sign and open the door. And of course, the stall was empty.

  But Midori stared at the door in front of her now.

  Kaname, you idiot. If only you knew how much that stuff stuck with me.

  She stepped toward the door. “Hanako-san?”

  Seconds passed.

  “Hanako-san?”

  “Yes?” the person behind the door suddenly whispered.

  Midori jumped back and had to support herself on the counter to keep from falling. Her heart was hammering out of control.

  “You’re looking for gate J5, aren’t you?” the voice continued in a whisper.

  Midori couldn’t get a word out. How did you know that? she thought.

  “It’s here, it’s nearby, Midori. But you mustn’t go there. You must promise never to go there.”

  Midori thought she heard another sound of movement in the stall and saw the door handle move.

  With a massive effort, she tore herself out of her temporary paralysis and ran out into the hallway, back out into the departures hall again. She stopped for a second to get her bearings and look for her mother. She looked right and left. Then right again.

  At the end of a narrow corridor she hadn’t noticed before, a sign glowed over a door: J5, lit up in white against a black background. Then she felt a hand on her shoulder. Midori stopped and found herself face-to-face with her father.

  “Look, you found it,” he said with a smile, nodding in the direction of the sign. “Let’s go, then.” Midori was so bewildered that she couldn’t say anything about what had happened in the bathroom. She didn’t even notice that her father had bought a ridiculous T-shirt that read fly me to the moon. He found it at a gift shop while he was looking around the terminal and had put it on right away, as a sort of last-minute declaration of support for his daughter. He hurried off toward the door at the end of the corridor, and Midori and her mother followed along noiselessly and obediently.

  The corridor was empty and devoid of any signage. Midori felt uncomfortable and longed to tell her parents what the person in the bathroom had said, and that maybe they should go back, but she was scared that they would just start wondering if she was even healthy enough to travel to New York. Besides, her father was moving down the corridor so fast there was no time to think.

  “This has to be it,” her father announced optimistically. “This gate must be totally new, since they haven’t put up any permanent signage. No wonder it was nearly impossible to find.” He pushed the door at the end of the corridor and held it open for Midori and her mother so they could enter first.

  To their great relief they stepped into a departure lounge that looked just like all the others up in the terminal. But all three of them were surprised to see that it was full of passengers, waiting impatiently to board the flight.

  “How did all these people get here?” Midori asked, noticing that she could hear a little nervousness in her own voice.

  But her father, who was taking the whole thing with remarkable calm, said, “I suppose they came a different way. I think we must have come through some sort of service entrance. Don’t you think?”

  Midori nodded absentmindedly and racked her brain trying to understand what had happened in the last few minutes. But it didn’t ma
ke any sense, none at all, and she decided to just put it out of her mind. They were at the gate now; that was the most important thing.

  But that person in the bathroom said …

  Don’t think about it, Midori. Don’t think about it. You’re going to New York now, think about that. Your life starts now.

  THE PLANE

  Antoine was sitting on the stairs outside his family’s summer home in Cherbourg-Octeville, on the Normandy coast. There was only one day to go before he was supposed to leave for Houston with his parents. The training course at Johnson Space Center with the other two teenagers would start, and from there they would be busy nonstop until the big launch.

  The day he had gotten the letter from NASA felt so long ago now. He had really acted like a crazy person with all that business at the Eiffel Tower, hadn’t he? Luckily, that was all behind him. He turned his eyes up toward the sky, but it was too light out to see the moon. It was just the sun, the white March sun that shone down on the little coastal village, making everything look as if it were in black and white. It begins tomorrow, he thought.

  Antoine picked up the photo album he had brought out onto the steps and opened it. His father had been the one to suggest they go out to Cherbourg-Octeville for the last week. It was almost impossible to be in a bad mood out here, where you always felt the ocean, breathed the fresh air coming off the Channel. And then there were the colors, the light.

  The only thing that didn’t fit in this idyllic picture was the worn photo album that had been sitting on the bookshelf in the living room and that he was now holding in his hands. As a child Antoine had avoided the album like the plague. He had flipped through it once, without knowing what it was, and after that he couldn’t sleep for days. The album was from 1945, and an American soldier had sent it to Antoine’s great-grandparents as a gift. When the Allied forces came ashore on the Normandy coast in World War II to start the final push against the Nazis in the summer of 1944, Cherbourg had been hit hard. Like many others, his great-grandparents had taken in soldiers and let them recover for a few days. One of the sheltered soldiers had later sent an album of photos that he and his division had taken while they were there.

  Most of the pictures just showed jubilant scenes of soldiers hugging the local population, eating together, and smiling for the camera — but there were also a few pictures that showed the gruesome consequences of the war. The picture that had terrified Antoine as a child showed the entrance to the summer home with a bullet-riddled soldier slumped against the front door, his blood trickling down the two front steps. One of his fellow soldiers was sitting next to him with his helmet in his hand, looking sad. Antoine’s parents had tried to tell him that the soldier was just sleeping, but he knew that wasn’t true. The soldier was dead. As a boy Antoine had been sure that the soldier, or his ghost, was still sitting out there on the steps, and for two summers in a row he had consistently gone in and out of the house through the back door. But as he got older, he instead made a habit of browsing through the album each time he came, studying the bullet hole that was next to the door, reminding himself that his own problems paled in comparison to what horrors happened here more than seventy years ago.

  He sat there looking at the picture of the soldiers leaving their landing vessels, coming ashore on the beaches not far from here. But the picture could just as easily have been taken on the moon. The soldiers waded ashore onto an unknown beach completely shrouded in smoke and fog. Somewhere behind them you could just make out a dark hill. And that was when it hit Antoine that he didn’t know what was waiting for him where he was going either. Not that anyone was going to attack him up there, but still … Was it really as safe as his father thought it would be? How many other people had done this before him? Ten? Twelve? It couldn’t be more than that, he was sure.

  An uncomfortable thought — that maybe it had all been a mistake — started growing within him.

  Antoine looked at the time. It was almost five. In an hour his relatives from the city would arrive at the summerhouse, and they would all spend the last night before his departure with his parents. His mother was already in the kitchen, preparations in full swing for the many courses she would serve. Antoine set the photo album down and strolled the little way down to the water.

  That’s where they had come from, those poor young men who had been sent to liberate France. What were they thinking on their way in? Were they scared or calm, convinced that they wouldn’t make it back home alive again anyway? He mulled that thought over but realized he wasn’t able to fully process it. No, he had to come back from the moon in one piece. He wasn’t doing it to put as much distance between himself and Simone as possible. It was more that he hoped that she would follow his experiences on TV and realize she still loved him. If not that, this whole thing would be a total waste.

  And then he heard it, the sound of a plane. It struck him that the sound came practically out of nowhere, but now the rumbling jet turbines were very clear. The engines didn’t sound normal and low, the way they should. They sounded more like a whine, as if the pilot were desperately trying to correct his course. Antoine tilted his head back and spotted a passenger plane …

  … as it came crashing down from the sky.

  He sat there, totally paralyzed with his mouth open, watching the plane tearing through the cloud layer, down toward the ocean.

  No, no, no, no, no, he thought.

  The next second seemed to take forever. He managed to stand up and turn around to see if there was someone he could call out to. But there was no one there, not a soul. He was alone on the pier, and the plane was heading for the surface at full speed. And then he saw that the tail was painted with the enormous letters qu.

  That … that just couldn’t be.

  He had no time to think anything else before the plane smashed into the waves a couple thousand yards farther out and exploded in a violent ball of flame with an infernal sound that forced Antoine to cover his ears. Seconds later the wave of heat hit him, and he had to turn away for a second. And when he looked back out at the water, he saw burning jet fuel floating on the surface. He heard distant screams and squinted out into the twilight.

  There were people out there. Survivors! They were clinging to the wreckage of the sinking tail section.

  What do I do now? What in the world can I do?

  His whole body was trembling, the adrenaline was surging through him, and his pulse was racing so hard that he thought his heart would split just from the pressure. His legs felt numb and he was sick to his stomach, cold as ice. One single thought kept going around and around in his head: I have to do something.

  But he knew there was nothing he could do. He didn’t have a boat and couldn’t swim that far into the turbulent water.

  He stood there mired in indecision, staring out at the flames, where the plane’s tail section was disappearing down into the depths. He thought it already seemed that there were fewer voices crying out. Maybe they were all drowning, all of them? He turned and ran back to the summerhouse to call for help.

  The first sign that something was seriously wrong was evident almost immediately.

  He came storming into the kitchen and encountered his mother, who was standing by the dish drainer smiling at him.

  His parents hadn’t heard anything.

  How could they not have heard that? The sound had been deafening.

  But they weren’t the only ones who hadn’t noticed it. No one else had, either. Antoine’s mother rather reluctantly called the coast guard after listening to his story, but they reported back that there had not been any plane crashes in the area. Antoine’s visiting relatives hadn’t noticed anything unusual.

  Eventually Antoine stopped talking about it, mostly because he was afraid they were right. That it had never happened and the whole thing had just been a far-too-lifelike hallucination. Because that would mean he was losing his mind, wouldn’t it?

  But he knew he hadn’t imagined it. A plane had crashed into the
English Channel, before his very eyes.

  He had seen people die.

  And he had seen those two inexplicable letters on the plane’s tail section: QU. As somewhat of an airline buff, he knew that QU was the symbol for East African Airlines planes, but … they never flew here. They operated exclusively in Africa — and, besides, the company had filed for bankruptcy several years ago. The coast guard had been in touch with the airline’s former owners, but they said the only plane they had ever owned had been sold to another company in Kenya, which had repainted the tail markings with its own logo.

  Antoine was deeply anxious when he woke up the next morning. But he didn’t mention it, and his parents also pretended to have forgotten the whole episode. The newspaper and the radio didn’t mention a word about it, either. After breakfast he sat with his laptop in his lap Googling information about possible accidents in the area but found nothing. He also checked Wikipedia, where he read about topics like hallucinations and abnormal psychology, but none of what he read seemed to fit. The only explanation he could come up with was that he had had some kind of panic attack.

  Antoine was still worried a couple hours later when they boarded the large Air France plane that would take them to New York. He couldn’t get away from the nagging thought that what he had seen the previous night was a sign. A sign that he should stay away from the skies. A sign that it was dangerous up there.

  He did his best to look on the bright side. Think about the future, he told himself. Think about what’s ahead of you, all the experiences you’re going to have. The future begins now, you know.

  And with those words, repeated to himself until he could calm down at last, his plane took off over the French capital, destined for America.

  NEW YORK CITY

  The sky was dark and grayish blue over Manhattan as the Nomeland family’s taxi sailed over the Brooklyn Bridge, heading for the posh Four Seasons Hotel on East Fifty-Seventh Street. There was something dark and gloomy about the whole city; this wasn’t how Mia had imagined it. Her parents, either, she thought. The mood in the car was tense, and the few words that were spoken were colored by guarded nervousness. Until now it had all been like a game, like a great vacation awaiting them. But the seriousness of the situation had slowly dawned on them all: