by Nick Lake
“But…but…”
Emily didn’t have time for this. None of them had time for it. She explained it all, as succinctly as she could. How she had found the ship—not that ship was the right word, of course. It had been the day she’d been suspended from school, but she didn’t mention that part to Bob.
The rest, though, she told. How she had heard it first—the breaking of the trees, the impact with the earth. She’d run out of the house a moment before, after her mom drove her home, after the boys’ locker room burned, and her mom was shouting after her, shouting for her to come back, that her dad was going to be home soon, that they needed to talk about this as a family.
And then there had been the noise: splintering branches; a dull thud.
She had gone out from their yard on the edge of the small town by the lake and into the woods, and she told Bob how she had seen the thing there in the burned and blackened earth, all the snow melted into air. The near impossibility of comprehending the angles and lines her eyes were delivering to her brain.
And then the creature: the small creature, weakened, that came out. Too weak, she learned afterward, to put up its instinctual defense, to hide itself within the form of what she would need to keep safe, to protect.
Emily hadn’t known what to do. She could barely understand where this thing’s edges were, let alone offer any kind of help, of healing.
But then, gradually, it had taken on the form of a boy.
The boy touched her hand, closed his eyes, and stood there for a long moment, in a shaft of light slanting down through the trees.
She said the same thing as Bob. The a-word.
The little boy opened his eyes and looked up at her. “I suppose,” he said. “But please don’t tell? Until I can get home again…”
“Don’t tell?” she said. “There’s a ship. There’s you…”
He shook his head. “There’s only a little boy, lost. We’ll hide the ship.”
This was all going too fast. She looked around, remembering the…whatever it was that she had seen. His real body. “Won’t someone find out?” she had asked. “Won’t they see…what I saw? The real you?”
“No, not if you keep my secret. No one else will. They will only see”—he indicated his boy’s body—“this. Or something similar. I was…weak…when you found me. That’s why you saw me as I really am. Now it is working again.”
“What’s working?”
“What I do,” he said. “I can’t help it. It’s…it’s…” He touched her hand again. She had a strange thought that there was something more than gestural about it. Like he was taking something from her. But not in a bad way. “It’s like a squid spraying ink.”
“What do you do?”
“I make myself into something small, if I encounter another species. Something they will love. Something they will protect.”
And she looked down at the small boy, who was staring up at her with such hope and trust. And something inside her shifted.
“Yes,” she said. “I see that.”
“Only…it won’t totally work on you. I mean, you’ll see me as a human. But because you saw the…other…me, you’ll always remember. You’ll always know who I really am.”
“Um,” she said. “OK.” This whole thing was so baffling, so new, that she didn’t know how to respond to any of it; didn’t know how she felt, even.
“Do you live with other people?”
She thought of her parents, who would be wondering where she was, who would be wanting to talk about why she was no longer allowed to go to school, about why the police were considering pressing charges for arson.
“Yes,” she said.
“Then they…People who haven’t seen my true form…will see me as someone they already know. They will think they’ve always known me.”
“OK,” she said. She hadn’t realized the significance of that at the time.
“Emily,” he said.
She hadn’t mentioned her name.
She took in a breath. Glanced at her hand where he had touched it. “What did you do when you touched me then?”
“I saw your memories. Everything you know.”
“Oh.” She turned her hand over, marveling. It felt the same. She didn’t even feel scared.
“Emily, will you keep my secret? I have to find a way to get home….No one can know my real self. Or they won’t let me leave. Will you help me?”
She didn’t hesitate. The wanting-to-protect thing was already working. “Yes,” she said.
So they covered the ship with branches, and they went back to the house, and that was when things got weird—which was in itself a weird thing to think, given what had already happened.
When she was small, Emily had always wanted a little brother or sister, someone to play with. Someone to hang out with, have a shared language with, songs to sing, jokes. But her parents had always said no.
“We’ve got a perfect kid,” her dad would say. “Why would we need another?”
Which shouldn’t have been annoying but was. Emily didn’t want to be perfect: she just didn’t want to be alone, to be lonely, to be always different from the people around her. She didn’t know how to tell her parents that she didn’t like the same things as them: hiking, camping, the great outdoors.
But she did know one thing: they liked those things, and they liked Alaska, and they definitely didn’t want any other kids—as far as they were concerned, life was perfect as it was.
“We want to give you everything,” her mom always said—but everything didn’t include a sibling.
So it was a surprise when she walked in with Aidan—thinking she would sneak him up to her room and bring him some food before the shit really hit the fan—it was a thin plan, flimsy, but it was all she had—and when she entered the kitchen, at first their faces were dark and her dad opened his mouth to shout at her, and then he saw Aidan, and beamed, and clapped him on the back and said, “Aidan! We wondered where you’d gone, but you were out with your big sister, huh?” and her mom gave the little boy a kiss on the cheek and mussed his hair.
CHAPTER 16
BACK THEN, THE day he arrived, Emily looked wide-eyed at the alien who was now a boy, who was now Aidan.
He shrugged.
“I can’t help it,” he said.
“Help what, honey?” said Mom.
“Being so intelligent,” said Aidan. “We were doing riddles, and I figured out Emily’s easy.” He did a kind of eye-roll thing, directed at her. A way of including her, as if they were a team, as if it were them against everyone else, as if they were complicit. In that moment, Emily sensed her heart could go one way or another, she could accept or reject what was being offered; but she smiled at him. She was like him; she couldn’t help it.
Then her parents turned to her.
“Aidan, go to your room,” her dad said. As if Aidan had a room.
“Why?” said Aidan.
“We need to talk to Emily. About…what happened at school.”
Her dad pointed to the chairs at the kitchen table, like: Sit down. Emily sat.
“A fire, Emily?” he said. “What were you thinking? I mean, I knew you didn’t love this place, but what the…?”
She shrugged.
“The school is considering full expulsion,” said her mom. “And the police want to talk to you.” She paused, her voice crumbling. “Is it something I did? Or didn’t do? Am I to blame for this somehow?” Tears started in her eyes.
“No, sweetheart, this isn’t on you,” said Emily’s dad, putting an arm around her mom. “Emily. See what you’re doing to your mother.”
Emily looked down at the table. At the whorls and swirls in the wood. What could she say? She’d burned down part of the school. She hadn’t meant to, but that sort of distinction didn’t feel like it would improve
anything. This was about as bad as it got.
She looked up and met Aidan’s eyes.
He winked.
Then he turned to her parents, and…
It was hard to describe. He just sort of looked at them, but he was glowing. Only without actually glowing.
Her mom opened and closed her mouth, like a nutcracker soldier. Her dad leaned his head over to one side.
“What were we talking about?” said her mom.
“I…I don’t know,” said her dad.
“Huh,” said her mom. “It’s the strangest thing….I just…I…”
“You said we could stream a movie tonight,” said Aidan. “Make popcorn.”
Her mom’s face brightened. “Yes! Good idea, honey.”
“Emily can choose,” said Aidan. “She’s had a tough day.” He smiled at her.
“Sure,” said her dad. “You’ve always been so generous, kiddo.”
Always been.
Head spinning, Emily took Aidan’s hand and led him upstairs to her room, leaving her parents standing in the kitchen, bemused looks on their faces.
“Whatever you did to them,” she said when they were in her room, “don’t ever do it to me.”
Aidan nodded. “OK.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
She sighed. “It won’t work forever, making it go away. I could have burned down the whole football stadium.”
“It’ll work for however long I want it to,” he replied. Then he smiled his brightest smile. “Anyway, I know all your memories, remember? I know you didn’t mean to do it.”
Later, they came into the kitchen for dinner, ahead of their movie night. Emily’s mom had made hot dogs, and was popping corn in a big pan on the stovetop. Emily hated the kitchen. It was small and functional, no decoration apart from her mom’s motivational fridge magnets.
A picture of an arctic fox cub, with the words: WE ALL HAVE THE POTENTIAL FOR GREATNESS WITHIN US.
Another with a flexed bicep and: BE STRONGER THAN YOUR EXCUSES.
And one her mom loved so much there were actually two magnets with the same words: YOU DON’T KNOW YOUR OWN STRENGTH.
Her mom had set the table earlier, and now she frowned at it, like it had moved when her back was turned. “Huh,” she said. “I’m such a ditz. I set the table for three.” She went over to the cupboards and took out an extra plate, knife and fork, glass.
If it hadn’t been so freaky, it would have been impressive. There were no photos of Aidan in the house, only of Emily, but it didn’t seem to matter to her parents. He had always been there. He would always be there.
When they went up to bed that night, her parents somehow didn’t see that the spare room didn’t have any stuff in it—that it was just a double bed and a lamp on a small table, ready for guests. They did not appear to notice that there were no toys, no posters, no crayon marks on the walls. They tucked Aidan in and told him a bedtime story—Emily watched and listened from the doorway; it was about a boy who climbed a mountain to look for a flower that would save his grandmother, and never had she been told a story like it.
It was weird. It was awful, it was sad. All she had ever wanted was for her parents to leave her alone, but in that moment she felt a deep pang of jealousy.
But she never resented him. In fact, he made her laugh, just like their parents said—their parents, their parents, it was even in her own head.
He teased her; made up silly songs about farts and kangaroos; played long and elaborate games of Monopoly with her, the rules of the game only vaguely applying to the baroque world they created together, of landlords and tenants and anarchists and magicians.
From that first day she knew: she would never let anything happen to him. He’d looked inside her head—he knew everything about her, all her secrets. He was someone she couldn’t lie to, and she’d loved him almost instantly.
She should have known it couldn’t last.
CHAPTER 17
THEY WERE ON their way to school; Aidan was in third grade, he always had been. Mrs. Jameson was his teacher, and she liked him, though he was hard to teach and often acted up.
Well, Aidan was on his way to school. Emily was taking Aidan, more precisely. She herself was still suspended, pending a police investigation—not that she had spoken much to her parents about it since the first blowup with her mom when she’d picked Emily up from the school—after Miss Brady caught her outside, with the lighter and cigarettes, in the parking lot, where the snow was melting from the heat of the fire.
Aidan had derailed everything.
Even the investigation: two police detectives had come to the door. (Emily had a feeling there were only two police officers in the town.) They’d asked to speak to Emily about the suspected arson, and Aidan had stepped out of the living room and looked at them, and they had gone away, frowning and muttering something about a lost dog.
But that, in a weird way, was good. Emily had done something terrible, something irreparable, and yet she existed in a bubble inside reality, a bubble where it didn’t matter, where no one close to her seemed to remember it in detail, and there were no repercussions, despite the blackened metal beams where the roof of the locker room had been.
Her parents knew it had happened, their memory had returned enough for that, but they weren’t angry about it, despite people in town treating them weirdly because of it—it was as if Aidan had done something to take the oxygen from the flames of their anger, starve it.
So she lived in a strange limbo. Still suspended but facing no other consequences for her mistake. With a brother who had always existed but didn’t exist.
Aidan had his own mythology, Emily had quickly realized. His own place and story within the family. He was cheeky, he was funny: that was his thing. Emily’s dad reminded her, on another day a week or so later, how even when Aidan was a toddler, he had bossed everyone around. How if he or her mom had annoyed Aidan when he was, like, three years old, he would say, “Hey, stop that, or I will throw you in the trash.” But with a twinkle, so you had to laugh.
He’d been affectionate too, always: her mom and dad agreed on that. Her mom told her how once she’d been going out to get a haircut and Emily was going to babysit Aidan. He’d been four, no more. Still tiny: just over waist-high. Mom had been at the door, coat on, and he’d glared at her. “Mommy,” he’d said. “You can’t go without giving me a duddle.” He had been unable to say k sounds, so the car was the tar and a cuddle was a duddle.
Except that he had been unable to say anything because he didn’t exist.
He was built by their minds.
He was a thing out of place and time, a strange gift from the sky, and for the first time Emily had an ally, someone who understood her, and a loud, fun family, and not only that but protection from her own stupid mistake.
For the first time in a long time, she was happy.
But then the men in black had come.
They’d been passing Java Jamboree, the only coffee shop in town. Emily felt Aidan’s hand tighten in hers. There were two men in suits inside, looking back at them through the window. They were wearing sunglasses, though it was dark even in the morning.
“Those men,” Aidan said. “They see me.”
“Yeah,” she said, distracted. “Hard not to.” She’d bought him a jacket, for warmth, but her allowance only went so far and most of his clothes were still hers. Today, he was wearing her old bright pink coat with a dinosaur on it, and neon-green pants. She’d brought them down from the attic, where her outgrown things were stored. Strange, the way her parents kept all this too-small stuff, all her old onesies and things, even though they didn’t want a bigger family.
Hadn’t wanted a bigger family. Because they seemed superhappy to have Aidan: her dad was always taking him out to play catch, and throwing him up
in the air and making him giggle, and the part of Emily that she kept hidden, even from herself, was a blade of jealousy turned inward on her own stomach, lacerating it.
“No,” he said. “They see me. They know who I am.”
It switched her out of idle and into drive. Her eyes flicked over to the men in the window. Their out-of-town suits. City suits. Their close-cropped military hair. Her dad’s hair had been like that when he came out of the army.
“What do they want?” she said. But she had an idea that she already knew. People always wanted to take things apart to understand them, didn’t they? As if a thing couldn’t be understood by leaving it whole.
“Nothing good,” he said.
After that day, they saw the men everywhere. It was a small town. And one day the men knocked on the door, and Emily and Aidan hid upstairs, and only came down when they had gone.
“Some kind of census,” said Emily’s mom. “They wanted to see you, but I told them you were asleep.” She looked at her watch, and her mouth turned down, a line of puzzlement. “Not sure why I said that. I mean, you haven’t napped in the daytime for years, Aidan.”
Aidan tapped his head and winked at Emily.
But they knew the men would be back, so that was when they decided to leave. It solved everything: get Aidan away from these men who wanted to take him somewhere, to experiment on him—at least that was what they assumed. Get Emily away from the town where, at some point, people were going to remember that she had torched the fricking boys’ locker room.
Her parents would at some point remember.
So they’d packed some stuff, and they’d stowed away on the little plane, climbing aboard with the mail packages and the supplies while Bob was having coffee with the two-man ground crew. Security was more or less nonexistent at the airfield, and what little there was, Aidan had bypassed with his mind tricks.
They were gone—they were mist—they were out of there.
Until the plane crashed.
CHAPTER 18
“AND THAT, BASICALLY, is that,” said Emily to Bob.
