by Jeff Giles
He shook his head. The vision was ridiculous—and dangerous, besides. The longer he resisted returning to the Lowlands, the more he imperiled them all.
Yet even the sound of Zoe’s breathing in the darkness captivated him. It was nearly five in the morning now. They were the only ones left awake. Some protective instinct made it impossible for him to sleep before she did. So X and Zoe just lay there in the dark. He listened to her breathing—waiting for it to deepen and slow—and had the sensation, though he had a hard time trusting it, that she was listening to his.
The blizzard had mauled Zoe’s and Jonah’s schools, and they had to be shut down for days. The flagpole at the high school had snapped in half and flown through the front doors like a missile. Half the windows on the northern side of the building had been shattered: all that remained of the glass was a rim of tiny, pointed shards that looked like vicious little teeth. Over at the elementary school, the classrooms were flooded with muddy water. Handwritten essays about climate change and drawings of horses floated through the hallways like lily pads.
X had fallen into a sleep so long and unbroken it was nearly a coma, his chest rising and falling, his legs dangling off the end of the ladybug. He slept through most of Monday. He was only vaguely aware of the comings and goings downstairs. He heard voices. He heard cupboards squeaking open and clapping shut. He heard branches being dragged across the snow and tossed onto a pile.
In the afternoon, a friend of Zoe’s arrived in a truck thumping with music. X heard Zoe call him Dallas, but wasn’t sure that was actually a name. Dallas had brought Zoe a coffee, which seemed to delight her (“Oh my god, does this have actual milk in it? Do not tell my mother.”). Still, she sent him away without letting him into the house. X knew that he himself was the reason, and he was just conscious enough to feel shame trickle through his chest.
Hours later, he woke again: another car engine, another friend. The sky was black, except for the fuzzy yellow lights of another town on the horizon. X’s shirt was soaked with perspiration.
This friend must have known Zoe well. She didn’t bother to knock on the front door—she just strode into the front hall, calling her name. The instant Zoe tried to send her away, the friend said, “Why are you being weird? Gloria and I take one four-hour nap—okay, it was five hours, shut up—and now you’re dissing me? And, by the way, what the hell was up with that insane Instagram? People are asking me about it.”
Even feverish and half-asleep, X could feel Zoe grow tense.
He heard a wooden step creak as she sat down: She didn’t want her friend anywhere near X. She was blocking the stairs.
“I’ll tell you everything, Val,” she said, finally. “But first tell me what you’ve heard.”
Val sighed.
“I hate this game,” she said. “Okay, I heard you solved the Wallaces’ murder, met a hot alien, and made the chief of police cry like a bitch.” She paused. “Let’s start with the alien.”
“He’s not an alien,” said Zoe.
“I’m disappointed,” said Val, “but go on.”
“I met him during the storm,” said Zoe. “He helped me and Jonah.”
“And?” said Val.
X didn’t understand the question, but Zoe clearly did. She lowered her voice to a whisper, not knowing how keen X’s hearing was.
“And he’s so hot I can’t even,” she said.
“You can’t even?” said Val.
They were giggling now.
“I can’t even begin to even,” said Zoe. “Ask me about his shoulders. Ask me about his arms. I mean it—pick a body part.”
“Okay, okay, I get it,” said Val. “Just because I think heterosexual sex is gross and immoral doesn’t mean I don’t understand what a hot guy is.”
Zoe laughed.
“It’s immoral now, too?” she said.
“Hello, overpopulation! Hello, world poverty!” Val said. “But I’m trying to be open-minded. Say more about the alien.”
“Still not an alien,” said Zoe.
“Still disappointed,” said Val.
X sank back into sleep like someone pushed down into a river. He only half-understood what he’d heard.
He awoke only twice on Tuesday.
The first time, Zoe propped his head up against a pillow and spooned broth into his mouth, saying gently, “Three more sips … Two more … One more … Come on, don’t fight me.”
The second time, she leaned over him with a glass of water and attempted to push something into his mouth. X was confused. He began to choke. Jonah, who’d been playing with dinosaurs and wizards on the floor, looked up and said in a shocked voice, “He doesn’t know how to use a straw?”
“Shut up, Jonah,” Zoe said. “Don’t embarrass him.”
Now that he was under Zoe’s care, X began to surface from dreams more regularly. The Trembling had loosened its grip. Stan’s sins flowed more quietly through his veins, though they never disappeared entirely.
Sometimes, he heard the Bissells wonder aloud about him when they thought he was sleeping. Was he from hell—was that what he meant by the Lowlands? Why was he sent there? What had he done? Was he alive? Was he undead? What were his superpowers and what were his weaknesses? These last two questions came from Jonah, who, as X’s eyes fluttered open momentarily, had also crept close and asked if he was one of the Avengers.
Zoe’s mother suggested they all write their questions down on slips of paper and put them in a metal mixing bowl she had placed on the nightstand. When he had recovered, she said, she’d see to it that he answered them all.
Now, even as he slept, X could sense the bowl beside him filling with paper. He dreaded answering the questions, and the dread crept into his dreams like a rising flood. He saw terrible images: a parade of every soul he had ever dragged to the Lowlands. He saw the fear he inspired in his victims and, sometimes, even his own hands in a ring around their throats. X was certain that the more Zoe knew about him, the more repulsed she would be. He had only done what the lords had commanded him to do—but he had done it.
X finally had the strength to sit up on Wednesday morning. Zoe and the others were curled on the floor, still murmuring low in their sleep. The Trembling should have forced X back to the Lowlands by now but, thanks to Zoe’s presence, the pain was muted. He gazed out the window, hungry for air. The frozen river glinted at the bottom of the hill like a long glowing ribbon.
He went outdoors, and the frigid wind blasted away the last remnants of sleep. The sun was not yet visible but it had sent a flood of orange and red across the sky to announce its arrival. X was grateful that the day was not yet bright. He had lived so long in a cell that his eyes were accustomed to darkness and to close quarters. He was most comfortable at this hour, when the world revealed itself slowly.
X had been trained to ignore the beauty of the Overworld. He had been taught to cast his eyes downward, or to stare straight ahead like a horse pulling a carriage. Any memories he formed here—not just of mountains and sky, but of the dogs nuzzling his face or of Zoe placing her hand against his chest—would make him suffer all the more when he returned to the Lowlands.
And he would be forced to return—he couldn’t let himself forget it. The lords would eventually haul him back home. What terrified him was that he didn’t know when or how—or what plague they would visit on Zoe’s family for giving him shelter.
X was weaving his way down the hill when he heard the door open behind him. He turned to see Zoe coming toward him. She had thrown on a coat and snowshoes, and her face wore a dark expression.
“Are you bailing on us?” she said.
“Bailing?” said X.
“Leaving. Are you leaving?”
“No, I assure you I am not.”
Zoe seemed not to believe him.
“Because enough people have left us already,” she said. “And Jonah likes you. You know who else was allowed to sleep in the ladybug? Nobody ever.”
“Zoe,” he said. “I am
merely testing my lungs.” He paused. “Will you walk with me? I would be glad of your company.”
He could see, in her eyes, that she was struggling to trust him—and he could see the instant she decided to try.
“Yes, kind sir,” she said. “I, too, should like to test my lungs.”
“Do you mock me?” he said.
“Verily, I do,” she said.
They walked in silence, down toward the snow-burdened trees. Zoe did not assault him with questions about who or what he was, and he was grateful for it. He could not remember a time when he’d simply walked beside someone with no horrible destination in mind. He could not remember anyone being so calm in his company. Zoe seemed not to fear him at all. Once, as they were crossing the frozen river, she even bumped against him playfully. He felt the whole length of his body flush with heat.
They found themselves, almost without realizing it, on the path to the lake. The dead part of the forest loomed ahead of them—the trees stood stripped and charred, as if they’d been decimated in an atomic blast. X watched as Zoe took in the grim sight. He offered to turn back. She shook her head no, like it was something she knew she had to overcome. To distract herself, she began singing: “‘Row, row, row your boat / Gently down the stream /Verily, verily, verily, verily / Life is but a dream.’”
“Even I know that tune,” said X. “Yet I think you have misrepresented the words.”
Zoe laughed: “Have I? I don’t think so.”
Again she gave him a little bump with her hip, and again he felt heat ripple through him.
When they reached the lake, Zoe walked directly to the hole that Stan had made, as if to convince herself that she hadn’t dreamed it all. X trailed after her.
The hole had mostly frozen over. It looked like a scab that was healing.
X wanted to pull Zoe away, wanted to protect her from the memories he knew would be sinking like pins into her brain.
She spoke before he could conceive of a plan.
“So Stan really did know my father,” she said. “That disgusting reptile knew my father. I thought he was lying when he said they were friends.”
X searched for something suitable to say. He was so unused to talking that forming even the simplest sentence felt like building a wall. Every word was a stone he had to weigh in his hands.
“Stan is poison,” X said carefully. “You must not let a single syllable he uttered into your blood.”
Zoe nodded, but he could see that she was distracted and had not truly heard him.
“You’d think that once my dad died,” she said, “he couldn’t disappoint me anymore.” She stopped and kicked at the ice with the tip of a snowshoe. “There goes that theory.”
X saw both hurt and anger in her—they were like competing storms.
“Yet you loved your father?” he said. “Or the disappointments would not pain you?”
Zoe hesitated just long enough that X felt his cheeks redden and wished he hadn’t spoken.
“I loved him,” she said. “Sometimes I think I loved him just enough to screw me up for the rest of my life.”
X was silent a moment.
“You do not seem … You do not seem screwed up to me,” he said.
Zoe laughed.
“Get to know me,” she said.
This time X spoke without thinking.
“Would that I could,” he said.
Zoe frowned and turned away. X wondered if it was because he’d reminded her that he would eventually have to leave. He decided it was better that she not forget it. It was better that neither of them forget.
She was staring down at the ice now. The edge of the hole was speckled—decorated almost—with Stan’s blood.
Zoe shivered, and straightened up again.
“There’s other stuff that Stan said,” she said. “I can’t stop hearing it in my head. He said he heard my dad died in ‘some goddamn cave’ and that we just left him there.”
“More poison,” X said.
“No,” said Zoe. “It’s true.”
There was another silence and, because the wind had quieted, it felt deeper somehow. X waited. Zoe began to tell him about her father—about the morning she woke up to find him gone, about the search for his body. She seemed surprised that the story flowed out of her so freely.
“I was pissed when I realized he’d gone caving without me,” she said. “I mean, it wasn’t just our thing—it was our only thing. If he thought I wasn’t ready to go caving in the snow or whatever, he should have waited for me. He should have trained me. We had one thing! How hard is it to keep one thing sacred?”
Zoe stopped for a second. X didn’t know if she would continue.
“I figured he’d gone up to Polebridge,” she said, at last. “There are two really tough caves up there—Black Teardrop and Silver Teardrop—so about 20 of us helped the cops look for him. It was insanely cold. My friends Val and Dallas came. They don’t even like each other, but they pretended to because I was so freaked out. Dallas brought a big jug of this disgusting, like, weight-lifter shake that he said would give us ‘the strength of a thousand badasses.’ I refused to drink it.” Zoe paused. “Jonah came, too. I mean, it was nuts that he was there. Some therapist told my mother it was a good idea. The kid was still seven—and he was up in the mountains looking for his dead dad.”
Zoe fell silent again.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You don’t want to hear all this.”
“I do,” said X.
Zoe searched his eyes to see if he was telling the truth.
“It’s a horrible story,” she said.
“Perhaps telling it will take away some of its power,” he said.
She nodded, and continued. X didn’t recognize all the words—some swam past him in schools, like exotic fish. Still, he felt Zoe’s pain seep into his chest and become his own.
“We searched around Silver Teardrop first,” she said. “We didn’t find anything. The caves up there both have supersteep caverns—just straight, like, hundred-foot drops—so nobody actually went inside. But at Black Teardrop, we found the rope my dad had used to lower himself down. One end was tied around a tree. The other just kind of disappeared into the cave.” She looked at X, and paused. “Jonah was the one who found the rope. He had this happy, little-kid look on his face, you know? He was like, ‘I found him! I found him!’”
Zoe turned away from X now.
“Then Jonah saw the blood on the end of the rope and all of a sudden he dropped the thing like it was a snake and started crying.” Zoe stared up at the sky. “I took the weight-lifter shake from Dallas and chugged the thing,” she said. “I ended up puking all over the place. Attractive, right?”
X could find no words to offer.
“Your father,” he said, when the silence had become uncomfortable. “He had fallen into the cave?”
“He must have stopped to take a picture while he was rappelling down,” said Zoe. “He probably wanted me to see some ice formation, or something. That’s actually the part that …” She couldn’t finish the sentence. “You know? Because he was doing it for me. And it would have been okay except that he used to wear this nerdy old helmet that had an actual flame for a light. That’s the way my dad was: he would do things because they were dorky. The flame must have burned through the rope. I used to love what a dork he was. But this time it got him killed.”
Zoe’s words hung in the air.
X put a hand on her shoulder. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d touched anyone that way. He wasn’t sure he ever had.
“The cops promised they’d go get my dad’s body, but they never did,” said Zoe. “They just fenced off the cave and left his body down there, all mangled or whatever. We had a memorial service in town, which was totally awful. Even the food sucked. Then my mom and Jonah and me had a little ceremony in our backyard. Jonah wanted to bury one of our dad’s T-shirts. He decorated a cardboard box with purple stars—that was, like, the coffin, I guess?—and pu
t an old T-shirt in it that said Ninja Dad. We buried it under a tree that Jonah’d be able to see from his window. We couldn’t bury it very deep because the ground was too hard. Anyway, it was this whole big thing. Jonah wrote a poem, but he was crying too hard to read it, so we just passed it around. I could only read, like, two lines before I started losing it. The first two lines—seriously—they were like, ‘Now that Daddy Man and I are apart / I don’t know what to do with my heart.’”
When Zoe had finished her story, X felt desperate to tell her something about himself, but every thought, every memory, every feeling was stuck in his throat.
He told her this in his stumbling way.
She shook her head.
“I didn’t tell you all that because I wanted you to tell me something,” she said. “I told you because I trust you.”
“And I you,” said X. “Yet still I stand here, dumb as a stump. Everything I know about myself shames me.”
Zoe looked at him so sadly now that X feared he had only compounded her pain.
“Just tell me one thing about your mom and dad,” she said. “One tiny thing. It doesn’t have to be some huge deal.”
X considered this.
“I do not know who they were,” he said.
Zoe breathed in sharply. X felt a stab of embarrassment.
He told her about the Lowlands a little. He wondered if she would believe him. When he saw that she did, his shame at who—and what—he was kept spreading. Zoe seemed to know it. She stepped forward and hugged him. He was too stunned by the gesture to hug her back.
“It’s time we gave you a name,” she said when they pulled apart. “I’m thinking Aragorn—or Fred.”
Later, they climbed the hill back toward the Bissells’ house, the white drifts sighing beneath their feet. Zoe pointed out the willow where they had buried her father’s T-shirt. It was a slender tree, heavy with snow and bending so low to the ground it looked as if it were trying to pick something up. It struck X as a lonely sight. He stepped forward and took the branches one by one in his hand. He shook the snow off gently until the tree could stand upright.
