by Kali Wallace
Lyle stopped, shoes scuffing in the dirt, and Mr. Willow said, “I’m proud of you, Lyle.”
I couldn’t see him, slung as I was over Lyle’s shoulder. Trying to lift my head for a better view only made my jaw feel like somebody was ripping it away with their hands.
“I know you must have been tempted to let her go,” said Mr. Willow. He sounded so understanding, so gentle. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t blaming anybody.
Lyle said nothing.
“You have a good heart,” Mr. Willow went on, “and I know you don’t wish to do anybody harm. You only want to help.”
“I only want to help Esme,” Lyle said, sullen, like a child tired of having to explain himself.
“I know. But you understand Mother does not see these things as we do. It would be dangerous for you to ask a boon of her without bringing a gift.” He said Mother like a title, an honorific, solemn rather than familiar. Footsteps on gravel, and Mr. Willow came around Lyle’s side to look at me. He grabbed my hair to lift my head. “She will like this one. Take it inside.”
In the front room of the yellow house Violet was holding Esme and rocking her, murmuring reassurances. Esme’s eyes were squeezed shut, but they snapped open as Lyle passed the doorway.
“You have to hide,” Esme said, her voice so clear and so strong it made Lyle jump. “Lyle, Lyle, you have to hide. You have to hide. They’re coming. You have to hide.”
“Violet will see to your sister,” Mr. Willow said as Lyle paused in the hallway.
“You have to hide. You have to hide.” Esme pushed Violet’s hands away and shook her head. “You have to hide. I’ll stop them. Lyle. Lyle. You have to hide.”
“Into the kitchen, please, and wait for me.” There was a trace of impatience in Mr. Willow’s voice. “The floor is easier to clean in there.”
Lyle kicked one of the chairs away from the kitchen table and sat me in it. I tried to stand and lurch away, but my leg gave out from under me with an agonizing pop. Lyle lifted me again, and this time he used both hands to hold me in place, one on my shoulder, the other curling around my neck.
“Move and I’ll rip your throat out,” he said. Then, softer, close to my ear: “I’m sorry. Don’t move. I’m sorry.”
I didn’t try to answer. My jaw was swollen and hot, my entire face burning with pain. I heard a soft drip, drip, drip. I was bleeding on their white tile floor. I hoped it stained the grout so deeply no bleach could ever get it out.
In the other room, Esme was still talking: “You have to hide. Lyle. You have to hide.”
Mr. Willow returned to the kitchen. He was on the phone. “Of course, of course. We all have our doubts, but we must remain strong. I know you can remain strong. Give my love to Barbara, and my apologies for dragging you away from her again.” A pause, a warm chuckle. “You’re lucky to have her. We’ll be there by six, if the road construction isn’t too bad. Is the other one secure? Good, good. It will be good to see you, Brian. I know Lyle is looking forward to learning from you. He is eager to do his part. Take care.”
He set the phone down and turned to me.
“I don’t like to do this,” he said, “but you leave me no choice. It would have been easier if you had chosen this willingly.”
He came a few steps closer. I kicked him with my good leg, splattered mud all over his khakis. He frowned and stepped back again; he wore the expression of somebody disappointed by a badly behaved puppy. The peculiar little beetle of shadow he carried deep in his chest began to unfurl, but I couldn’t reach him. I had grabbed the wrong man. I could have avoided all of this pain if only I had touched Mr. Willow’s hand and killed him.
“I spoke to Danny earlier, while you were with Violet,” said Mr. Willow casually, as though sharing news about a mutual friend. “He said he’s never seen anything like you before. He has found so many different creatures for us, but you’re new. He was quite repulsed.”
Danny, who had been staring at me like I was a puzzle to be solved, seeing something in me nobody else saw. The understanding was like needles under my skin. He had never wanted to help. I spat a wad of mud and blood onto the floor. Lyle’s claws pressed into my shoulder.
“But we know what you are. You are a foul lying thing that masquerades as human.”
Mr. Willow opened a cupboard and took out a few metal containers, the kind tea comes in, but old, dented, the labels long ago worn away. In another cupboard he found a glass, filled it with water, and set it on the counter.
“Sometimes you do it very well, well enough to fool even yourself, but your true nature will always be revealed in the end.”
He spooned a scoop from each tin into the water; metal clinked on glass as he stirred. A moldy, earthy scent filled the kitchen. He opened another cabinet and brought out a jar with a metal lid. It wasn’t until he unscrewed the lid and carefully tipped the jar did I see what it contained: beetles, each about the size of his thumbnail, scurrying and crawling over each other. Mr. Willow nudged a couple into the glass.
“The world is full of things like you,” he said. “Most people refuse to see, but a few of us know better.”
With the backside of the spoon, he crushed the beetles. Each collapsed with a quick wet snap.
“It’s not an easy thing to know about the world. Knowing also means carrying the burden of protecting the world from its worst creatures. Open its mouth, Lyle.”
I clamped my jaw shut—the pain made spots dance in my eyes—but Lyle was already digging his fingers into my gums and pressing down on my tongue. I thrashed at him with my free arm, scraping at his face, at his hands, but he hunched behind me and wrapped an arm around my chest to hold me in place.
“It used to be that when terrible things came into a community, we knew how to destroy them. The abominations, the evil creatures. Things like you.” Mr. Willow tapped the spoon on the side of the glass and set it aside. He didn’t look as calm as he sounded. He was still afraid of me. “Now, if there are monsters that wear human faces living in our cities, or hunting through our schools, or inviting darkness into our homes with whispers in the night, we have no defenses.”
Lyle’s claws dug into my chin and my tongue as he pried my mouth open. I tasted blood, felt it pooling under my tongue. I tried to throw my head from side to side, tried to spit, bite, flail, but Lyle was too strong.
In one smooth motion, Mr. Willow tipped the glass into my throat. Lyle forced my mouth closed before I could spit it out.
My teeth ground together. The concoction had the texture of muddy leaves and dirt, but it tasted of rotten meat left in the sun, rancid and green, with a tangy bitterness. Sharp edges scraped my throat and tongue. I gagged, but Lyle pressed his big hand over my mouth, and I couldn’t spit it out.
Mr. Willow stepped back. I felt his shadow unfolding long and thin, a filthy smudge spreading through the white kitchen.
“No defenses except for us,” he said, “and Mother, who is our salvation and our strength. There is too much evil in the world for us to fight it all, but with her help we do what we can. We will help you. You can’t go on like this, this terrible monstrous thing. She will be so happy to see you.”
I wanted to tell him I didn’t want to meet his mother. I might be a monstrous creature now. I might be unnatural. I might even be evil, but I didn’t want his help.
But I couldn’t say a thing. My tongue grew numb, and the numbness spread, dampening my anger, cooling the throbbing pain of my damaged bones, a heavy blanket of relief creeping through my entire body as a cold dense fog. My heart slowed, then stopped. The room darkened.
The stars began to emerge.
FIFTEEN
THE UNIVERSE IS mostly empty space.
The ground beneath our feet and the moon in the sky, the sun in the day and the stars at night, the feeling of being surrounded, embraced by matter and light and weight and heat—that’s all misleading. That’s the comforting lie we tell ourselves to avoid thinking about the truth, because the truth is darkne
ss and emptiness and deep, deep cold.
A woman named Karen Garrow told me that. Karen was my mother’s closest friend. She was a physicist, and Mom was in neuroscience, but they worked together to study how people perceive space and time, how our minds comprehend things so much bigger and weirder than our everyday experience. Karen was tall and dark haired, with copper skin and gray eyes. My sister Sunny told her once she looked like Nefertiti, and Karen had laughed and said she had her father to thank for that, whoever he was.
Karen was always being invited to appear on television shows about physics and astronomy. She was the one they interviewed when they wanted to prove that science was for minorities and young women as much as old white men. Every time she was on the Science Channel, I recorded the episodes and kept them on the DVR. I watched them all more than once and told myself it was because she was Mom’s friend and I found the topics interesting.
The summer after my freshman year of high school, Karen came with us to the lake cottage for a few weeks. She and Mom were writing a paper. They worked every day on the covered porch, articles and laptops spread before them, lemonade sweating in glasses, lunch forgotten on plates.
And every day I tucked myself into a wicker deck chair with a book from my summer reading list. I pretended to read while I watched Karen work. She wore glasses when she was writing, heavy black frames in the best sexy librarian style. They slipped down her nose every couple of minutes; she pushed them up without thinking.
One afternoon, after lunch, my sister Meadow shouted for Mom inside the house, and Mom went to help her find her bathing suit, her sunscreen, her hat, whatever she was looking for. Meadow never kept track of anything. The screen door snapped shut, and Karen tilted her chair back on two legs, stretched her arms above her head.
“Your mother is a slave driver, Breezy,” she said. “Do you think she’d let me take the afternoon off to the go to the beach?”
“She might,” I said.
I had been watching them and I knew Mom was the one who was restless, Karen the one so lost in her notes she was surprised every time she looked up to see the sunlight had crept a little farther along the painted floor.
“She’ll just have to deal with it,” Karen said. She pulled her long dark hair out of its ponytail, ran her fingers over her scalp, twisted her hair up again. There were faint lines along the back of her neck. Wrinkles, I thought, but when Karen rolled her head from side to side, I knew they were scars.
“What are you working on?” I asked.
She opened her eyes. “Nothing.”
Now that I had spotted the scars, I couldn’t take my eyes off them. “Really?”
“Really. Literally nothing.” Karen leaned forward and rested her elbows on the scattered papers, tapped a pen with one hand. “Have you ever heard of the supervoids?”
I wanted to say yes and impress her with my knowledge, but I had no idea what she was talking about. “I don’t think so. Super what?”
“Voids,” Karen said. She straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin, shifting effortlessly into the chatty professor persona she wore when she went on television to talk about black holes and parallel universes. “Voids in space. Regions where there are no stars, no galaxies, hardly any matter at all. There’s simply nothing.”
I felt like she wanted me to be more impressed than I was. “How big?”
“The Boötes void is two hundred and fifty million light-years across, and it’s nearly completely empty. Can you imagine that?” Karen was facing me now, gesturing with her hands. I couldn’t see the scars on her neck anymore.
“It’s crazy,” I said.
“No, no, not so fast.” Karen’s ponytail swung back and forth as she shook her head. “Think about it before you answer. If our corner of the universe was as empty as that, we wouldn’t have even known there were stars besides the sun until we had the telescopes we built in the 1960s. That’s how far away the nearest stars would be. But would we have ever built telescopes at all if we didn’t know there was anything out there worth looking for? Can you imagine?” Her eyes were wide and bright. “Try. Try to imagine what that would be like.”
I bit down on my initial response and did as she asked. I thought before I answered. There on the sunporch of our lake house, the summer day warm and blinding, I felt the hard wicker chair through the cushion beneath me, under my arm where I leaned. I smelled the dusty pages of my father’s copy of Frankenstein and felt the soft old paper against my fingers. Through the screened windows I saw sunlight on water and sand, the wind turning through the tall grass. I heard Sunny giggling in that excited way she had when she forgot she was trying to be more grown-up, and in the house Mom and Meadow were arguing, but not angrily. Their voices rose and fell as the floorboards creaked. A door slammed, and Meadow ran by the porch, a wide hat on her head and a bag over her shoulder. She slowed to a walk when she reached the sandy trail to the beach.
Karen was watching me through her black-rimmed glasses.
I closed my eyes and tried to put myself in outer space. Tried to push away our blue and green Earth surrounded by its artificial constellation of metal and mirrors, push away Mars ruddy and cold, Jupiter with its angry spot, Saturn black and white and wrapped in rings like it was in the Cassini photographs, beautiful blue Neptune with its captured moon Triton, our entire solar system in concentric ellipses around one lonely star. And farther out, the Horsehead Nebula in all its bright false color, the pale blur of the Andromeda Galaxy, the clean curl of a black hole devouring its sister star. I pushed it all away, deleted the stars one by one, wiped clear the smear of the Milky Way and emptied the sky.
I opened my eyes.
“No,” I said. “I can’t imagine that.”
“Exactly,” said Karen, grinning in triumph. I saw what she must be like as a professor, tall and captivating before rows of awed students in a windowless lecture hall. “Our brains aren’t designed to handle that much emptiness. But it’s real. It’s the nature of our universe, whether or not we can comprehend it. The universe doesn’t care if our tiny human brains understand anything. What do you know about quantum mechanics?”
“Schrödinger’s cat. The one in the box. It’s both dead and alive.”
Karen laughed. “A grossly inaccurate oversimplification of the concept, but I guess that’s okay for a layperson. How about multiple universes? Entanglement? Quantum tunneling?”
Mom opened the screen door. “Really, Karen, I don’t think you need to give my daughter an advanced physics lecture today. She’s not your postdoc. She’s on vacation.”
“I’m only trying to instill a sense of wonder in your depressingly sensible kid,” Karen said.
The words stung. I didn’t want to be a kid, a layperson, a sensible child with no sense of wonder. I wanted to be more impressive than Karen’s students. I wanted to dazzle her with my insightful questions and surprising knowledge.
But she was already going back to work. I unfolded my legs from the old wicker chair and dog-eared my page in Frankenstein.
“I don’t mind,” I said. “But I’m gonna go have a sense of wonder at the beach now.”
Mom kissed my forehead. “Don’t forget your sunscreen.”
I changed into my swimsuit and headed down to the water. Meadow was lying on her stomach on a plaid blanket, head pillowed on her arms. She didn’t stir when I sat down beside her, but a few minutes later she said, “If you can get over your girl crush on Karen long enough to notice, that guy with the kite is totally checking you out.”
“He is not,” I said. Then: “I don’t have a crush.”
Meadow didn’t even look at me. “Yeah, right.”
I don’t, I thought.
I like boys, I thought.
It’s not like that.
I worked down the list of possible responses in my mind. All of them sounded unconvincingly defensive.
“So what if I do?” I said.
Meadow’s voice was sleepy and slow. “So what if you
what?”
“Like girls too. As well as boys. Both.”
Meadow groaned and threw her arm over her face. “Oh my god, I don’t care. Go tell the kite boy if you want to share. Maybe he’s into it. Guys think bi girls are hot.”
I glared, but her eyes were closed, so I grabbed a handful of sand and threw it at her. I scrambled to my feet and skipped away before she could get me back.
On this planet, at least, in this universe, there was only one star in the sky and not a cloud in sight. I caught the kite boy’s eye, and I smiled.
A couple of months later Mom and Dad were talking about Karen Garrow during dinner.
“She’s taking a sabbatical in Italy as soon as she gets out of the hospital,” Mom said. “She wants to work on her next book.”
“Hospital?” I said, startled. “Why is she in the hospital? Is she sick?”
They exchanged a glance, one of their quick, silent conversations. Dad cleared his throat. Meadow and Sunny were paying attention too. Our parents didn’t lie to us, not if they could help it, but that didn’t mean they always told the truth.
“Karen’s ex-husband is not a very nice man,” Dad said.
And Mom said, “For all that she’s a genius about everything else, she can be really stupid about men.” It was an uncharacteristically nasty judgment from my mother, but she got that way sometimes when she was upset.
I thought about those fine scars on Karen’s neck, faded and hidden beneath the rich curtain of hair, but Dad changed the subject before I could ask what had happened.
SIXTEEN
THE STARS BLINKED OUT.
I woke up, and everything hurt.
I was lying on my side on a hard floor. I could still taste Mr. Willow’s concoction at the back of my throat, sour bile mixed with the metallic taint of blood. I had no idea how long I had been gone.
My limbs burned as the feeling came back. I could make my heart beat again, but erratically. One by one I identified my injuries. My jaw, my knee, the rib Lyle had snapped, they all ached, but the pain was muted. I could open my mouth, move my toes, inhale, and exhale. There was a hot, tight burn in the slashes on my side, but the cuts on my neck and face seemed to have healed. My head felt like somebody had hit me with a hammer.
