Ancient, Strange, and Lovely

by Susan Fletcher

  Sasha was supposed to meet me at one, over at my house. But the cops might want to go through the boxes. They might confiscate stuff, like when Mom first disappeared.

  I unstacked the boxes, opened the flaps, and set them in a circle around me. One box of supplies. One with folders, notebooks, and books. Two with paper-wrapped jars of dirt. Plus the egg box, still full of crumpled paper, which I’d brought back from the shed.

  Mom’s things.

  I imagined her with the boxes, maybe sometime in the future. Opening them up, sorting things out, putting them away. Cheerful and intent, the way she always was in the lab. As comfortable with beakers and pH paper and dirt as with saucepans and olive oil and garlic.

  Wait. Something odd in one of the dirt-jar boxes. Wrapped in paper, like everything else, but a different shape.

  I pulled it out. Unwrapped it.

  It was a roundish, heavyish lump of rock. Almost volleyball size, but way flatter. I held it up to the light. It seemed sculpted, sort of, into mostly hexagonal plates with grooves between them, like the scoring on a chocolate bar. All textured, with little bumps and pits.

  Familiar, somehow.

  Turtle eggy.

  Lizard eggy.

  The markings were the same as I remembered, the same as the critter’s egg. Except this egg was made out of stone.

  Petrified. A petrified egg.

  I took it in both hands, let it sit there. It felt heavy. Not just weight heavy but also heavy with—I don’t know—some kind of presence. Something terrible and old. I shivered. All of a sudden, I felt cold. All of a sudden, the basement seemed monster dark.

  What was I supposed to do?

  Why didn’t they tell me?

  Do as your Aunt Pen says. Wait for me, I’ll call. Don’t worry. Chins up.

  Well, I was tired of keeping my chin up. People disappeared. They let you down. Not on purpose, maybe, but they didn’t tell you things, and then they left you alone to deal. How were you supposed to know what to do?

  Outside, an owl hooted. Lonely sounding. Spooky. I checked my watch: quarter to one. Time to get moving. I had to do the best I could, that was all. Even though I could be messing up supremely. But last time, none of Mom’s stuff had helped the cops find her, and we’d never seen most of it again. So the notebooks and the dirt and the weird rock were going out with me.

  If the cops had a problem with that, they could just arrest me.

  16

  A SECURE, UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

  EUGENE, OREGON

  Sasha showed up at one fifteen. By that time, I’d hauled the boxes out of the basement, across the two backyards, and out to the curb near my house. Which pretty much wiped me out. Then I’d checked Dad’s e-mail again and confiscated his backup drive.

  I found her leaning against her car. “Hey,” she said, her voice soft.

  “Hey.”

  We each picked up a box and hauled it to her trunk. “This your mom’s work stuff?” Sasha asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Biology, right?” She popped the trunk; we set the boxes inside.

  “It’s actually microbiology,” I said.

  “Meaning …”

  “Tries to get microbes to eat environmental toxins. Like, you know, endocrine disruptors.”

  “Those things in plastics and pesticides? Making us sick?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow,” Sasha said. We headed back for more boxes. “They do that? Microbes eat that crap?”

  “Only certain ones. But Mom knows how to find them.” Knows, I said. Not knew.

  “So this stuff is, like, important.”

  “Yeah.” I picked up another box. Yeah, it was important. She had no idea.

  When we’d loaded all the boxes, I led Sasha around the side of the house to the studio. It was quiet, except for the faint rattlings of some small animal in the bushes and the swish of our pant legs through the long, wet grass. The moon hung low in the sky—yellow now. No celumbra. I reached for the key on the sill, unlocked the door, pushed it open.

  A thin wash of moonlight seeped in through the windows and leaked across the floor, the shelves, the clay-shaping tools.

  “Phew,” Sasha said. “Does that Taj guy smoke in here?”

  It did smell funny, like smoke.

  “He used to. I thought he quit.” You wouldn’t think a guy with a baby on the way would smoke. I beamed the flashlight on the critter. He was fast asleep, curled up with his tail around his nose, sides rising and falling.

  “Whoa,” Sasha said. She walked to his box, bent down, and stared. “Whoa!”

  Pretty much the standard response.

  “He’s huge,” Sasha said. “Like, freaky huge. Does he bite?”

  “He’s a big baby.”

  She reached out to touch him, then hesitated. “You sure?”

  I shrugged. “No guarantees, but I think you’re fine.”

  She moved her hand across his back. “He’s got, like, skin or something.”

  “Yeah, but I think he’s molting. Look.” I pointed to where the skin/fur was pulling away near his feet, and where his backbone spines had poked through. But now other places were peeling, too. The top of his head. His neck. His belly.

  Sasha’s hand stopped partway down his back. “What’s that?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “It’s all spongy and lumpy in there.”

  There was a lump, slightly smaller than the palm of my hand. Actually two lumps, one on either side of the critter’s spine.

  Hadn’t they been hard little knots before?

  “He’s just a lumpy guy,” I said.

  “What’s his name?”

  His name. “I don’t know,” I said. “Piper calls him Mr. Lizard.”

  “Mr. Lizard. Excellent. The amazing Mr. L. Well, better snag his peripherals and get out of here, huh?”

  I bagged the turkey baster, the plastic cup, a couple of cans of ReliaVite, a baggie full of sawdust pellets, and the plastic pooper scooper. “Listen,” I said. “The feeding’s kind of tricky. You’re probably going to make a mess the first time or two. Maybe you want to put down some plastic in your car. Garbage bags or something.” It seemed like there was more I ought to tell her. Like maybe I should demonstrate a feeding. What if she couldn’t do it? Those skwebs had to affect her dexterity.

  “Are we ready?” she asked.

  Strangely, no. I wasn’t. I leaned over the critter, scratched beneath his jaw. He curled himself tighter, folded his long, curved claws across his eyes. I could feel a faint, thrumming vibration.

  “Where will you take him?” I asked.

  “To a secure, undisclosed location. So they can’t torture it out of you.”

  Deadpan. She slugged me in the arm.

  “Ow!”

  “I’m actually not sure,” she said. “I think I’ll head out to this place where I go hiking. My phone’ll be on, so you can give me the all clear.”

  “You’re sure you don’t mind cutting school?”

  She looked at me. Dumb question. She probably did it all the time. I wondered about her family. Did they know? Did they care?

  “I’ll call you right after school,” I said.

  She hefted the grocery bag. I picked up the critter in the litter box. He was twitching his claws, the way I’d seen dogs and cats do when they were dreaming. Dreaming of running, maybe?

  What could a brand-new critter have to dream about?

  A strange, achy, bruised feeling spread out around my heart. I couldn’t seem to move my feet.

  Sasha headed for the door. “Let’s jet,” she said. “We don’t have all night.”

  17

  FLY AWAY HOME

  EUGENE, OREGON

  The moment school let out I powered up my phone and called Sasha. In the background, I could hear the critter squeaking. I felt myself go tense.

  “Where are you?” Sasha demanded. “Are you home yet?”

  “No, I’m in the parking lot.”

/>   Sasha swore. “Can you get home like pronto and find out if the coast is clear? Mr. Lizard doesn’t like me. He hisses at me, and snaps. He won’t eat and he won’t shut up. My head’s going nova.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. I hate that. Hurry.”

  The critter’s squeaking tugged at me, made me antsy. I picked up the pace, jogged across the street. “Is he okay?” I asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘okay’? Can’t you hear him? I’m going out of my pluperfect mind.”

  “He wouldn’t eat?”

  “Are you listening to anything I’m telling you? I couldn’t get the pink stuff inside him. And he’s swelling up, sort of, like he’s got intestinal gas. He’s scratching himself against the edge of his box and rubbing off his skin.”

  “What?”

  “Skin! He’s scratching off his skin. It’s all gone from his head and his legs and his tail. So now what you mostly see is, like, scales. Pink scales.”

  I’d never seen the critter actually scratching its skin/fur off. Birds did that kind of thing, I knew, when they were stressed-out or sick. Plucked out their feathers. I walked a little faster. “It’s probably just the molting thing,” I said. “Lizards do that. They molt.”

  “Pink lizards?”

  It was more like pinkish brown, but I wasn’t going to argue the point.

  “Hey, kids,” Sasha said, “it’s the Barbie lizard. Eats pink food. Craps pink poop. Lives in the Barbie mansion.”

  Jeez, she was coming unspooled. You wouldn’t think a pink reptile would throw her.

  “Does he look, like, sick?” I asked.

  “Did you hear what you just said? It’s a phaging pink lizard! How would I know if it looked sick?”

  I sighed.

  “Listen, Bryn. There’s some other stuff I have to tell you, but not on the phone. Something wicked sketchy’s going on. So would you find out—please!—if it’s safe to off-load this thing from my car? ASAP! I mean it.”

  “Okay,” I said. I beeped off. Then stuffed my phone in a pocket and ran the rest of the way home.

  ‡ ‡ ‡

  The studio seemed fine. The dust looked undisturbed, so probably no one had been inside.

  I picked up my phone to call Sasha, but then thought of something else. What if somebody was still in the house? No cars in the driveway, but I’d better make sure.

  I hadn’t noticed the yard on the way in. I’d been running. But now I could see what the landscapers had done: pulled out the brownish ground cover against the garage. Blown in bark dust. Hacked all the personality out of the bushes and clipped them into neat, rounded shapes—a row of giant jujubes. Ugly black plastic trays hung from the bottoms of the bird feeders, to catch those nasty seeds before they fell to the ground and sprouted.

  There wasn’t a dandelion in sight.

  I unlocked the front door, stepped inside, and stopped.

  Ladybugs. Speckling the floor, the couch, the tabletops, the chairs. Upside up and upside down, but all unmoving, all dead.

  I’d known this was going to happen. I had. But seeing them here, all dead, every single one …

  Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home. Your house is afire, your children are gone.

  They’re just bugs, I told myself. Not even ladybugs but Asian lady beetles. Invasive.

  But they were beautiful, and they didn’t bite people or suck their blood or pass along diseases. They only made you feel good, watching them, and they ate the bugs that ate trees and plants.

  And it meant our house was full of poison. Microscopic particles of toxic dust. No matter what those exterminator people tried to tell you, the poison was here, it would be here for a long time, and it did stuff, Mom said, that nobody understood.

  The house was quiet. Totally.

  Nobody home.

  I covered my face with my hands. Breathed. Looked up. Pulled out my cell. Dialed Sasha.

  “What!” she said.

  “All clear.”

  “Right.” She beeped off.

  I crunched across the carpet of ladybug corpses to the study, extruding sad little drops of yellow bug blood. The monitor stood blank-eyed on Dad’s desk. But the CPU under the desk was missing. I had the backup, and he’d probably saved everything to the cloud. But the cops had definitely been here.

  I opened the study window, breathed in the scent of moist, green, growing things. Things that were alive. I sagged down onto Dad’s chair, sprang up. Squished ladybugs on the chair. Yellow bug blood on my butt. I scraped off the corpses with Kleenex and sat down again. Dad’s magnifying globe spilled an arc of refracted light across the desk. I cradled the globe, heavy and cool, in my hands. I gazed into it, moved it back and forth, watched the things on the desk stretch and bulge, mutating into weird shapes, familiar yet grotesque. Like my life.

  Something wicked sketchy’s going on.

  I sighed, set down the globe. I got up and moved through the whole house, opening all of the windows, opening them wide. Ventilate. Let the poison out.

  Just as I heard Sasha pulling into the driveway, I noticed something flickering in one of the lampshades. I crossed the living room. Looked inside.

  A lady beetle. Miraculously, still alive.

  I coaxed it onto a finger and walked to the front door. Opened it, held the bug up high.

  Fly away home.

  It stood there a moment, as if sniffing the air. Then it lifted its tiny wings and fluttered unsteadily away.

  18

  RAGING GEOTOX

  EUGENE, OREGON

  Sasha rolled down her window. I could hear the critter squeaking. “Can you make it stop?” she demanded.

  “I think so.”

  “Then get in.”

  “Why don’t we just take him to the shed and—”

  “Make it stop now, or I’ll bash in its demented little brains!”

  No room in the backseat with the critter. Too much junk in there. I went around and pulled hard at the passenger door. It moaned, a deep, metal-grinding sound, a sound that said there were not so very many openings and shuttings left until it dropped clean off its hinges. The front seat was full of stuff. Sasha tossed a couple of books into the back and shoveled some papers to the floor, where they joined a pile of other junk—plastic grocery bags, empty Starbucks cups, a flattened Girl Scout cookie box, and wads of crumpled Kleenex. I slid in and hauled the door shut.

  I reached between the seats and stroked the critter’s head, now completely bare of skin. Some of the scales looked rough and raw and wounded, like when you pick off a scab too soon. Sasha had set aside the strips of discarded skin/fur in a soft, tattered lump at the edge of the box.

  I felt a tingle in my mind. Still squeaking, the critter raised his head, then hooked a set of claws into my jacket sleeve. I tried to untangle them, so I could pick him up, but he hooked in his other front claws, and then his two back sets, and clambered up my arm until his head rested on my shoulder. I nestled him against my chest, kenned him comforting vibes.

  The squeaking stopped.

  “Kudos,” Sasha said. “Clearly you’re the fave.”

  The sharp crest on his head scraped against my neck, which hurt, but not all that much. It was pointy but soft, like a little kid’s flexible toy knife. A few wrinkly patches of skin/fur still clung to those puffy, swollen-seeming places, but you could see the whole of his spine ridge—not just the tips—from the top of his head all down his long neck to the end of his whippy tail. His face looked different, less puppy-kitten cute. Bony shelves shadowed his eyes, like eyebrows. If he weren’t such a baby, I would have said he looked fierce.

  He relaxed against me now, grew heavier and limp, and started up with the vibrating thing.

  “That’s annoying,” Sasha said. “He hates my guts.” She reached to touch him. The critter stiffened, hissed at her. She stuck out her tongue at him. “See what I’m saying?” She tossed me a sweatshirt. “Cover him with this. Just in case. You take him, I’ll take his stuff.
Let’s go.”

  In Dad’s studio, Sasha set down the bag and slid the critter’s box onto its shelf. I started to put him in it, but he latched onto my jacket and wouldn’t let go. The sweatshirt slipped off. I handed it to Sasha.

  “I’m getting weirded out,” she said.

  “What happened?”

  “Well, for one thing, there’s the smoke.”

  “You mean Taj? Smoking in here?”

  “No, I don’t mean Taj. I mean, I’m sitting there in the car, and pretty soon I realize I’m smelling smoke. And I don’t smoke anymore.”

  “You used to smoke?”

  “In eighth grade. But that’s not the point. The point is, I’m sitting there and I smell it. I’m thinking maybe the car’s on fire. So I pop the hood and scope out the engine. Then I get down on my hands and knees and look underneath. Nothing. But when I get back inside, there it is again, stronger than before. Just then, the critter yawns. So I lean down, put my nose right next to those vicious baby incisors. And I swear, it smells like smoke.”

  “But the whole car was smelling like smoke, right?”

  “It was way, way stronger on the critter’s breath.”

  I leaned in and sniffed. He didn’t smell like licorice anymore. He smelled like something burnt. Burnt toast.

  I admitted it: “Okay, that’s strange.”

  The critter sighed against me. I looked down at him. His belly was bulging.

  “You sure you didn’t get any food in him?”

  “Hardly any. He wouldn’t sit still. Let’s see you do it.” She hunted through the bag for the feeding things. “So I’m in the car, before the squeaking starts? I’m starting to get bored, so I look in those boxes you gave me. I figured you wouldn’t mind.”

  “I don’t,” I said quickly. Though I sort of did. That was Mom’s stuff. It was personal. But I hadn’t said not to look, and she was doing me a seismic favor.

  Sasha poured the ReliaVite into the glass, sucked up a basterful, and handed it to me. The critter lifted his head, started sniffing. I sat on the floor and let the critter slip into my lap. I nudged open his jaws, and squirted.

  Bull’s-eye.

  “You have skills,” Sasha said. A little resentfully. She sighed, sat down beside us.