Hand on the doorknob, I shout to Mom, “I’m going outside,” as I pull my blonde ponytail through the hole in my baseball cap.
I’ve almost made my escape when Mom yells from the kitchen. “Take your brother.”
“Arghhhh. He doesn’t want to go,” I argue, the darkness beckoning me like a best friend.
“Yes, I do,” the Imp contradicts from his seated position halfway up the stairs.
Five years younger, the Imp, as I call my brother, is an unwanted shadow that I can’t shake. He’s not interested in the stars. Bugs and dinosaurs are his thing. He certainly isn’t going to like standing quietly in the cold night to stare into space. He just wants to be with me … all the time.
The night sky, the darkness, that belongs to me. Now I’m being asked to share it. The Imp will shatter the perfect silence with an endless string of questions that can only come from the mind of a six-year-old.
“See.” Mom comes out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a dish towel. “He wants to go. Scottie. Put on your jacket and gloves. I’m going upstairs to shower.”
I check my phone. Only twenty minutes before they will appear. “Come on, come onnnn,” I groan as I watch my brother spin around and around trying to stuff his other arm into his jacket.
Reluctantly, I help him find the second arm hole. Bending down, I zip up his jacket, knowing the zipping process would have been another delay. “Let’s go.”
“What about my gloves?”
I grab his hand and pull him out the door. “I’ll put them on when we get there.”
“Where’s there?”
The questions have begun, and I know there will be more if I don’t figure out a way to keep him quiet. I have an idea. “Shhh. They will hear us.”
“Who will hear us?” Scottie whispers back.
I turn to face him, opening my eyes wide as if I’m scared. “The aliens, of course.”
“Aliens? The green ones or the grays? Are we going to see them or just their spaceships?” Scottie does not sound afraid.
Darn. Scaring him into silence didn’t work. It’s only created more questions. “I don’t know. But what I do know is that if you keep talking, we won’t see anything at all. Now come on.”
We run/walk down the sidewalk past the glow of our neighbors’ houses in search of darkness. At the end of the cul-de-sac, there’s a gate that opens onto a dirt hiking trail. We follow the trail, the dirt crunching under our tennis shoes, as we leave the neighborhood behind. Coyote yips puncture the silence, and Scottie grabs my hand. His little fingers are like popsicles. I stopped long enough to help him with his gloves.
“We need to get past those trees for a clear view of the sky.” I point to the tall dark shadows on the horizon. “Hold my hand so you don’t fall.”
Running side-by-side, Scottie has no problem keeping up with me. His legs might be smaller, but he moves them twice as fast. Finally, past the trees, the moonless sky opens before us. Light pollution from the city masks all but the brightest stars and planets, but we should be able to see “the aliens.”
I orient myself using the Big Dipper and the North Star. We face the foothills to the northwest. “Look up that way. They should be showing up any minute now.”
“How do you know? Did the aliens send you a message?”
“I have an app that tells me when and where they will appear. Now be quiet and keep looking.” 1
For one glorious minute, we stand silently under the night sky. I’m admiring the bright light of Venus when the Imp shouts, “There!”
Appearing one at a time, as if coming out of hyperspace, a bright light floats across the sky at a steady pace, followed by another, then another, then another. They appear as a train of lights, brighter than the stars, but no match for Venus’s brilliance.
“Wow. Where are they going?”
“Shhh. They’ll hear you. Just watch. Let’s see how many there are.”
As we count, more and more lights pop into existence, 21 in total, before the first light in the train disappears. Each light blinks out in the exact same spot as the first until they are all gone.
The Imp is bouncing up and down. “Where’d they go? Are they coming back? Do you think they are going to land or keep on flying? Should we tell Mom?”
“Let’s go,” I say before answering all his questions. “They are circling the earth. They’ll be back tomorrow night. They are not going to land, and sure, you can tell Mom.”
I don’t tell him the “aliens” spaceships are Starlink satellites.
“Tomorrow? Can we come again?”
“Sure,” I say with a smile.
The phone call I’ll never forget wakes me at three in the morning. “There’s been an accident.”
Traffic is light as I drive like a shooting star, gripping the steering wheel like I want to strangle it as tears turn the oncoming car lights into spiral galaxies.
At the hospital, the hours drip by as I hold my brother’s hand, my mother’s sobbing creating the soundtrack of this terrible moment.
I remember the night Scottie and I looked up together and found a common interest that cemented a friendship that has spanned the years. No matter the miles between us, we could cast our eyes skyward and feel connected, forever linked by the night sky.
As if reading my mind, Scottie whispers, “Remember the night we saw the aliens?”
I nod, trying to hold back tears, as I squeeze his hand.
“That was the best night ever, right?”
I didn’t appreciate the moment then, but I long to be back under the stars with my brother now.
“The best night ever,” I say, choking on the words.
Then Scottie sighs, slipping away to dance among the stars.
Dialogue with Christie Walker Bos: ‘Linked’