Midge found him there. She sat down beside him, her notebook open.
Andromeda did not put her sunglasses back on. She looked at the sky. It looked back, calm and empty and full of everything she had just learned to see.
"Or a pupil," Midge said. "An eye looking up at what hit it."
He thought about it. The apartment in New York where his wife’s dresses still hung in the closet. The stage door of the Cort Theatre, where his name was still on a faded playbill. The back seat of his son-in-law’s station wagon, with three children who had just watched their father speak to a creature from another world and were already treating it as just another Tuesday. Asteroid City
He laughed. It was a dry, broken sound. "I've been pretending for so long, I don't remember the real lines."
The road out of Asteroid City was long and straight, disappearing into a heat shimmer that made the horizon look like water. Stanley got into the car. Midge waved from the diner doorway. Woodrow started the engine.
She wrote something in her notebook. Then she tore out the page and handed it to him. It was a single sentence: The alien was looking for its child. Midge found him there
Woodrow glanced in the rearview mirror. The town shrank behind them. The crater was already just a dent in the earth.
The first creature materialized beside it with a soft pop of displaced air. It reached out its three-fingered hand. The smaller one took it. They stood together in the crater, two impossible beings under a sky full of stars that were, for the first time all night, exactly where they were supposed to be.
A woman beside him laughed. She was a magnetic, weary-looking creature with ink-stained fingers and a notebook perpetually open. Her name was Midge, and she was the mother of one of the other Stargazers, a quiet boy named Clifford who had built a replica of the Sputnik core out of chicken wire and baked beans tins. She looked at the sky
It was not a cloud, not a bird, not a plane. It was as if someone had run a finger over a film projector’s lens, smearing the light. A high-pitched whine, like a tuning fork struck against a tombstone, vibrated through the ground. The children looked up. The adults looked up. The lizard with the blue tail stopped mid-dash.
Andromeda, in the back seat, said, "Dad? Do you think they found what they were looking for?"
Woodrow picked it up. It was warm. He held it to his ear and heard—not a sound, but a rhythm. A heartbeat. Two heartbeats. One fast and thin. One slow and deep.