Armada Read Free Page B

of me. It was still only midafternoon, but a nearly full moon was already faintly visible overhead, and my gaze kept locking onto it as I scanned the heavens. As a result, I almost ran two stop signs during the short drive home, then came within a few inches of getting broadsided by an SUV when I coasted through a red light.
    After that, I put on my hazard lights and drove the last few miles at a crawl—still craning my neck out the window, unable to keep my eyes off the sky.

I parked in the empty driveway and killed the engine, but I didn’t get out of the car right away. Instead I sat there gripping the wheel with both hands, peering silently up at the attic window of our little ivy-covered brick house, thinking about the first time I’d gone up there to dig through my father’s old possessions. I’d felt like a young Clark Kent, preparing to finally learn the truth about his origins from the holographic ghost of his own long-dead father. But now I was thinking of a young Jedi-in-training named Luke Skywalker, looking into the mouth of that cave on Dagobah while Master Yoda told him about today’s activity lesson: Strong with the Dark Side of the Force that place is . In you must go, mofo.
    So in I went.
    When I unlocked the front door of our house and stepped into the living room, Muffit, our ancient beagle, glanced up at me sleepily from where he was stretched out on the rug. A few years earlier he would have been waiting for me just inside the door, yapping like a madman. But the poor guy had now grown so old and deaf that my arrival barely woke him. Muffit rolled onto his back, and I gave his tummy a few quick rubs before heading upstairs. The old dog watched me go, but didn’t follow.
    When I finally reached the attic door, I just stood there at the top of the stairs, with one hand on the doorknob. I didn’t open the door. I didn’t go in. Not right away.
    First I needed a moment to prepare myself.
    His name was Xavier Ulysses Lightman, and he died when he was only nineteen years old. I was still just a baby at the time, so I didn’t remember him. Growing up, I’d always told myself that was lucky. Because you can’t miss someone you don’t even remember.
    But the truth was, I did miss him. And I’d attempted to fill the void created by his absence with data, by absorbing every scrap of information about him that I could. Sometimes, it felt like I was trying to earn the right to miss him with the same intensity my mom and his parents had always seemed to.
    When I was around ten years old, I entered what I thought of now as my “Garp phase.” That was when my lifelong curiosity about my late father gradually blossomed into a full-blown obsession.
    Up until that point, I’d made do with a vague, idealized image of my young father that had gradually formed in my mind over the years. But in actuality, I really only knew four basic facts about him—the same four things I’d heard over and over again throughout my childhood, mostly from my grandparents:
    1.I looked just like him when he was (insert my current age).
    2.He had loved me and my mother very much.
    3.He died in an on-the-job accident at the local wastewater treatment plant.
    4.The accident supposedly wasn’t his fault
    But once my age reached double digits, these vague details were no longer sufficient to satisfy my growing curiosity about him. So, naturally, I began to barrage his widow with questions. Daily. Incessantly. At the time, I was too young and clueless to realize how painful it was for my mother to be endlessly interrogated about her dead husband by his ten-year-old clone. No, my self-involved ass couldn’t seem to connect those glowing neon dots, so I kept right on asking questions, and my mother, trooper that she was, answered them to the best of her ability, for as long as she could.
    Then, one day, she handed me a small brass key and told me about the boxes up in