“I checked around too, Bryn. I think it’s okay. You did good.”
We looked down at the lizard, still sleeping. Still pinkish tan. It wasn’t just the Slendah drips. The pink was all over.
“You want to do the honors,” Taj asked, “or shall I?”
Strangely, I did. I slid my hand under the lizard’s belly, picked it up. It was limp, and actually kind of warm. It moaned and melted in against me. Like a friendly old cat, but lighter. Its little birdy claws hooked themselves into my sweater. I unsnagged them, one at a time. The critter swiveled its head around, snuffled blindly at my neck, and revved up with the vibrating.
Taj opened the REI bag, started fiddling with the socks. I pulled the critter close and nestled its head against one shoulder, like Mom taught me to hold Piper when she was a baby. Its microfiberish skin had dried. It felt velvety and soft. I could feel it breathing against me, easy and slow.
Cryptid, dormant.
Taj clicked the solar collectors into the socks and set them on the windowsill. He turned to me and bowed.
“Bravo!” I said.
He smiled. Still cute. “You’ll have to do the water bottle until they charge. And, hey,” he said, “do you think it would bite me if I took a mouth swab?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.” The critter seemed pretty mellow at the moment.
From his backpack, Taj produced a glass jar and a cotton swab. He nudged the swab tip into the corner of the critter’s mouth and swabbed around in there. The critter yawned.
Taj dropped the swab in the jar. “Have you told anyone else about this guy?” he asked. “Any of your friends?”
“No. Only, well, Piper knows.”
“You told Piper?”
“I couldn’t help it. She was with me when it was hatching. I thought it was going to be like an ostrich or something.”
“I hope you told her not to tell anyone.”
“Of course I did. But she’s five. She’s going to tell, eventually.”
Taj swore under his breath. “So there’s probably not much time.”
The critter nuzzled one bony cheek ridge against my shoulder. I reached up, scratched above its eye ridges. It moved its head so that I was scratching just beneath its chin. Taj frowned.
“What?” I asked.
He dove into another bag, pulled out the six-packs of ReliaVite. “How much did it drink last night?”
“Maybe half a can.”
“And you fed it again this morning?”
“Yeah. Another half can. It doesn’t all get inside him, though. The feeding’s kind of tricky.”
“Problems with the delivery system? Or is it your technique?”
Like to see you try, I thought. But no. Be nice. He’s helping.
“I think we’re going to have to feed it three or four times a day, at least,” he said. “For a while.”
We. I liked the sound of that. “Okay,” I said.
“Seems like you could maybe get up early and feed it before school. And then again in the afternoon. I could do a late-night feeding. I work till eleven most nights. And you’re practically on my way home.”
“But the critter’ll be alone most of the day. Probably scared. Probably squeaking.”
“It’ll be fine, Bryn. And no one will hear it out here. I’ll need a key, though. Can I take this and get one made? I’ll leave the old one on the doorsill tonight.”
“Stellar,” I said.
The critter’s thrumming ramped up. I looked down at him, scratched along the edge of his jaw. He started to knead my shoulder, knead me with his claws. Good thing I had on a thick sweater.
Silly Mr. Lizard.
“What?” Taj asked.
I turned to him, plexed.
“You’re smiling,” he said.
“He, like, purrs.”
“With you, it does.” Taj was frowning again.
“What?” I asked.
“You called it he.”
I shrugged. It just felt like a he.
“Aren’t you going to put it in the new box?”
“I will in a minute.”
Taj narrowed his eyes. “You know what imprinting is?”
“No, Taj, I’ve never taken a bio class in my life. I don’t know any biologists, and I’ve never heard anybody even mention the word ‘imprinting.’”
Taj sighed. “No need to get pissy. I’m just saying. It acts as if it thinks you’re its mother or something. And if it is imprinted … well, the zoo is going to be tough.”
I stroked the critter’s head. He pressed against my fingers, tilting so that I was rubbing a place just between his squinched-shut eyes.
“I’m going now,” Taj said. “I’ll return the key.”
He was halfway out the door when I called to him. “Hey, Taj.”
He turned back.
“Thanks. I mean it. Thank you.”
He nodded, let himself out.
I moved my hand to rub against the critter’s eye ridges. He butted against my palm, and the purring thing amped up until there was a river of vibration flowing across my body.
I think you’re in trouble, I told myself.
Seriously in trouble.
12
SOMEPLACE REALLY REMOTE
EUGENE, OREGON
Dad called that night, but the connection was bad. He was someplace really remote, he said. He was “onto something,” he said. Onto what, I never quite got. I told him about the lizard, but I wasn’t sure he understood. He said something like “Does Pen know?” Or maybe it was something about a window. There was a bunch of static right then. I couldn’t hear a thing.
But if he had really understood me, wouldn’t he have done something? I didn’t know exactly what, but something. Instead, he said he might not be able to call for the next several days, maybe even a week, but that I shouldn’t worry. As if I could keep from worrying. “Why can’t you call?” I asked. He was onto something, he said again. Then came another blast of static, and the phone went dead. “Love you,” I said into the empty air.
I set down the phone, slumped back against my pillow. Stella nipped down from my shoulder and meandered around on my chest. She stretched up, nibbled at my ear.
Onto something. What could that mean? Onto something about Mom?
I knew I shouldn’t hope for too much. That’s what everybody said. Even the ones who told me not to give up hope when Mom first disappeared last fall. But now it was: Don’t get your hopes up too high.
But hope, it just does whatever it’s going to do. Sometimes it flakes out on you when you really need it. Other times it hangs around way too long, after everybody’s left the party and the lights have all been turned out. You can bust out trying to squish hope down, but you’re wasting your time. If hope wants to lift you up out of the wreckage so you can get creamed again, you just have to take it.
One good thing: The feedings were going okay. Mr. Lizard was really glugging down the ReliaVite. Even cold. Not that it didn’t take me a while to get the hang of it. Over the next week, I managed to squirt pink goo on the critter’s neck, on his back, on his chest, and on his tail. Plus all over the new box and the pellets and the floor. Once, I accidentally squirted ReliaVite up one of the critter’s nostrils. He started shaking his head and doing a funny whuffing thing, kind of like sneezing. He kept it up for a monster long time. I’ve killed him, I thought. I’ve murdered the last of a super-endangered species. But he calmed down after a while.
My only consolation was that Taj was having trouble, too. Every morning I found new pink splatters in assorted inappropriate locations.
Trouble with the technique, there, eh, Taj?
The business with the pee and the poop turned out not to be so bad, but I went through a megaton of sawdust pellets. At first, I scooped the dirty ones into plastic baggies and threw them in Aunt Pen’s garbage can. But the bags started mounting up, looking kind of obvious in there, looking like something Aunt Pen might notice. So I tried
strewing the stuff over the parts of Aunt Pen’s backyard where there was bark dust under the trees, and that seemed to work pretty well. Sometimes I raked it, to mix it with the bark. Make it, like, match. I didn’t think it would hurt the trees. It was organic, right? Fertilizer.
Piper was a problem. Not so much with the early-morning feedings but in the afternoons. My first plan had been to tell her that the critter had gone to a secret lizard farm out in the desert of eastern Oregon, a farm with special sun-warmed rocks to bask on and buckets of yummy crickets and mealworms to eat. That way, if Piper spilled it, people would think she was making it up. Crazy kid. What an imagination!
But Piper went to the after-school program only three afternoons a week, and when she was home she pretty much barnacled herself to me, and Mr. Lizard had to be fed. I had no choice. Had to take her with me. Every time, though, I swore her to secrecy. Literally. I made her raise her right hand and swear.
One night at dinner, Aunt Pen kind of casually said to me, “Unless I’m mistaken, your dad hasn’t called for five days.”
I looked up from my enchiladas. Piper did too. Aunt Pen didn’t expect to talk to Dad every time he called. “I’m not his sister, after all,” she had said. She had said this more than once. But apparently, she was keeping track.
“Yeah,” I said. “I told you. He’s someplace really remote. He warned me he might not be able to call for a while.”
Aunt Pen said, “Hmm.” It was quick and light, that Hmm, but there was a whole world in it. Mom’s disappearing. The chance that lightning could strike twice.
By the time a week had passed with no word from Dad, I was pretty much a train wreck. Maybe even a week, he had said. I hadn’t let myself think about longer. Now the scenarios started scrolling through my head, just like last fall. The good ones, where Dad had found Mom somewhere or other, and she was fine, and they were out of phone range, or they couldn’t use one for some reason, or Dad had lost the charger, or maybe they were planning to show up on Aunt Pen’s doorstep: Surprise!
Then came the web-of-doom scenarios, crowding out the good ones: the car wrecks, the airplane crashes, the botulism beans. The heart attacks, the rabid dogs, the chemical spills. The drownings, the freezings, the falls.
It got harder and harder to sleep. It’s true that I was totally wiped, but I had this weird, restless energy; I couldn’t stand to be inside my own skin. I wanted to squirt right out of it and fly off to a different time, a time in the near future when I knew that Dad was okay. Or maybe to some alternate universe where Mom was safe at home, where that professor, that Dr. Jones, had never called her and invited her up to Alaska.
I floated through classes in a strange kind of bubble, seeing but not seeing, hearing but not hearing. I crashed at random times. Zoned out in pre-calc. Nodded off in pan-global. Almost fell off my chair in Chinese.
Once, in the hallway, I almost walked smack into an open locker door. “Whoa there, zombie girl!” I turned toward the voice. There was Sasha, just behind me. “Wake up!” she said. “You just about got doored.” She put a hand between my shoulder blades and eased me away from the lockers and into the flow of moving kids.
The one thing in my life that—bizarrely—seemed to calm me down and center me was the critter. By the second week, we’d settled into a routine. He started squeaking when I stepped in the door, but stopped the moment I spoke to him. He swiveled his head around, eyes still squeezed shut. Sniffing—seeming to track my movements by smell.
I took to feeding him on my lap. I sat cross-legged on the floor, supporting him with one hand and squeezing the turkey baster bulb with the other. He leaned back into me as he drank. Thrumming in his throat. Kneading my legs with his claws. When I stroked his skin/fur, a fine powder came off on my fingers. If I blew on them, the powder lifted off, hung in the air, shimmered in the light. It felt like we were in the center of a hurricane—a little hollowed-out space of peace.
Things were changing in the critterworld. For one thing, he was growing. Kind of mediumish cat-size now—way bigger than petite little Asteroid.
One day, I noticed that his skin/fur stuff had started to pull away near the tops of his feet. Underneath, I could see tiny, pinkish scales. The next day, a row of pointy spines poked Mohawk-style through the skin/fur on his backbone. I fingered two hard nodules on either side of his spine. He was a bumpy guy, but these seemed bigger than before.
Another day I brought Stella with me, buttoned inside my jacket. In the shed, I kenned her to my shoulder. We leaned over the critter, still sleeping in his plastic box. I tickled him under his chin. He yawned, lifted his head … and, for the first time, opened his eyes.
Whoa.
He stared straight at us, eyes wide. Acid green. Almond-shaped. Weird, vertical pupils.
Stella chirruped low in her throat. The critter chirruped back, sounding eerily similar. Stella jumped onto his back and pecked at bits of loose skin/fur, grooming him. “Hey,” I said. “I don’t think that’s safe.” I tried to ken with her, but something was happening with her—happening with them—some private exchange I couldn’t port into.
Talking to each other?
And then I felt it, a kind of seeking, a tingle in my mind.
Kenning?
It felt clueless and glumfy, like my first kennings with Stella when she was a baby bird. But there was a deeper freq too, almost subliminal—a hum beneath the surface.
Then it was gone.
Kenning.
This guy kens.
I shivered. In all the family stories, no one had ever kenned with anything other than birds. Never.
Stella fluffed her feathers. She made that sound again, that throaty, chirruping thing. She cocked her head and fizzed me a proud little ken.
“How long have you known about this?” I asked her.
‡ ‡ ‡
Late that night, I heard voices. I stepped into the hallway to listen.
Only Aunt Pen, talking on the phone. “What in heaven’s name is he thinking, stringing the girls along this way!”
I froze. There was a pause.
“Well,” she said, “they need their father at home. Especially now. They seem to be holding up—God only knows how. They’re tough little gals. But it’s not fair to them. Not fair at all.”
Must be one of Aunt Pen’s friends from Bountiful. Her door stood partway open. I tiptoed near to hear better.
“He was calling,” she said. “He promised to call every night. But now it’s been well over a week. Nearly two weeks. Stubborn, selfish man!”
I ducked back into my room, shut the door behind me. How dared she! Dad wasn’t selfish—he was trying to find out about Mom.
But still … I felt a sting behind my eyes. Tough little gals. I never knew she thought of us that way.
I sat on the bed and mentally scrolled through that last conversation with Dad. He’d sounded sorry, and stressed, but there’d been something else too. Onto something.
Was it Mom he was onto?
Last fall, the police had checked her e-mail for clues. Maybe there were some clues in Dad’s inbox. But to snoop his mail …
No. That was just wrong.
For sure he’d call any day now. Maybe tomorrow.
I skootched under the covers, flipped over into fetal, tried to get some sleep.
Onto something.
What? What was Dad onto?
13
JUST WRONG
EUGENE, OREGON
In the end, I had to snoop.
The next day, I did the after-school feeding, then headed over to the house. My house. Hadn’t been there for a while.
I let myself in the front door, and something crunched under my shoe.
I lifted my foot. Three squished bugs on the floor. Ladybugs. Little globules of yellowish liquid bled out of their shells. Another ladybug dropped with a soft click onto the tiles.
I looked up.
Clouds of ladybugs trembled on the ceiling. They pixilated the windows,
the table, the couch, the walls; they crusted over the skylights. Another click: A ladybug fell from the ceiling and landed on a lampshade. Click on the woodstove. Click on the coffee table. Click. Click. Click.
A drift of ladybugs lifted off the skylight and floated across the room. Their wings caught the sunlight, morphed watery images of color and shadow and light across the walls. It felt like a visitation of something spooky-sacred, like when people see unexplained lights in the sky, maybe, or one of those deals where the Virgin Mary shows up in the glass wall of a hospital or a bank.
But there was something wrong about it too. Broken. Out of whack. Like the swarms of possums and voles and raccoons. Like the whales beaching themselves and dying. Like the deformed crocodiles in Florida swamps. Like the spate of mutant human babies in Texas and Iowa, born with webbed fingers and flippery toes. Like the plumes of toxic chemicals on Mom’s maps—stretching their poisonous tentacles into water tables and rivers and lakes and oceans.
Another bug cloud spun off from the ceiling. It fluttered down, passed through me, and now I was full of them: my face, my hair, my sweater, my hands.
Terrible. Wonderful. Terrible.
I shook out my hair, brushed at my sweater, aching so fiercely for Dad to be here, or Mom. They would know what to do, what powers to invoke. No poison would pass the threshold. But there would be smoke, or there would be noise, or there would be cardboard traps that snagged their prey live, or there would be something, something that shooed the little critters out of our space and encouraged them to find new homes.
I tiptoed around the ladybug clusters on the floor, made my way to the home office. Way fewer bugs in here. Still, I brushed a couple off Dad’s chair and blew one off the keyboard. Sat down. Powered up Dad’s CPU. Logged on to his e-mail.
Which also felt wrong.
I scrolled past messages from the Potters’ Guild, the American Ceramic Society, the Association of Retired Public Relations Professionals. Word-a-day. Amazon new book alert. Sporting Cosmos loved Dad, apparently. So did Hardware Arsenal. There was an e-mail from his friend David Larkins, asking if he could go hiking next week. There was one from his clay supplier, telling him about a great new offer if he reordered now. A few were from his old Intel friends. How are you, Buddy? Any news? One guy, Cliff Moray, seemed worried. Pardon my saying, but maybe you should see someone. You’ve been through a lot.
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