The Spaceship Next Door

by Gene Doucette

  Annie tried to shoot Vi a please don’t leave me here alone look, but Violet was already gone.

  Ed was gamely trying to keep the conversation at the table going as he pulled the documents from his jacket pocket. “I understand Annie and your daughter have known one another for a long time, and…”

  “Yes, yes, sorry,” Susan said. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Somerville, I was thinking about poor Carol.” To Annie, she said, “Are you all right, dear?”

  She’d never called Annie dear before, or anything even distantly maternal. It was jarring.

  “I’m okay, thank you.”

  “Well of course, you can stay as long as you need. Violet will set you up in the guest room.”

  “That would be great.”

  “Good,” Ed said. He was visibly relieved.

  “Do I need to sign something?” Susan asked.

  “Yes, actually, I have a form here. I’m still her guardian and all, but… let me just add a little legalese at the bottom here. If you could sign it, that would be great.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Ed jotted a few words under his own signature, probably along the lines of, if something happens to me, check with these people for Annie. Then he drew a line on the bottom and handed it over.

  Susan skimmed what he’d written, signed it and handed it back.

  “Great, thank you so much, Mrs… Jones?” He was reading her signature.

  “Susan, please. We don’t concern ourselves with formal titles around here.”

  “Susan, then. And you can call me Ed.” He slipped the paperwork back into his pocket, and stood. “Annie, are you okay with all this?”

  “Sure, Ed, I’ll be fine.”

  “Great. I’ll be back Tuesday, usual time, but call me if anything… you know, with your mom. Or anything at all.”

  “You’ll be by to pick her up?” Susan asked.

  “Yes, on Tuesday. We have a busy day ahead.”

  Already, Annie was thinking of ways she could continue to live at her house but get picked up at Violet’s when Ed needed her, but she couldn’t come up with an uncomplicated way for that to work. At minimum, she would need Susan to be complicit, which was a pretty big ask.

  Ed stepped around the table to say goodbye to Annie, which was another species of awkward because he wasn’t sure what halfway between a handshake and a hug was supposed to look like, so it managed to be a little of both. Then he saw himself out.

  “Thanks for this, Susan, I appreciate it.”

  “Don’t worry yourself. I just hope everything will be okay with Carol.”

  “I’m sure it will. I… I’ll need to go home and pick up some things, though. All my clothes and stuff are there. And my bike.”

  “Of course,” Susan said. “Violet can take you. She needs to run to the store today as it is.”

  * * *

  “I’m sorry,” Annie said, as soon as she and Violet were alone. They were in the car and on the way to the grocery store, as it turned out one of the things Vi’s family didn’t have enough of was food. Guest bedroom, yes. Food for guest, not so much.

  “It’s fine.”

  “I didn’t know where else to go.”

  “It’s okay, I understand. A call ahead would have maybe been cool. A text, even.”

  “It happened fast. I didn’t know what else to do. One minute I was like, looks like I’m dipping into the frozen pizza stash for the next few weeks, the next minute Ed was looking to make me a ward of the state or something.”

  “He’s just looking out for you. He seems like a good guy.”

  “You talked to him for all of ten seconds.”

  “Are you saying he is not a good guy?”

  “No, no, just you didn’t have a lot of time.”

  “I’m a quick judge. Mom seemed okay with him.”

  Annie didn’t want to point out that Violet’s mother was perhaps the most inscrutable person she’d met in her life, as that seemed rude. But it was impossible to tell, without employing precise scientific equipment, what reaction Susan had to Ed, good or bad. Perhaps her dad was the expressive one in the family.

  “Well I don’t want to disrupt anybody or be a burden or whatever. I’ll stay out of everyone’s way, so you guys can do… you know, whatever.”

  Violet laughed.

  “Yes, the goat sacrifice at midnight is really a family thing.”

  “I mean… I don’t know. Whatever home-schooling you’ve got going on.”

  “It’s summer.”

  “I know, but still.”

  “Is this your way of saying you think my family is a little weird?”

  “No, no. Not a little.”

  “I’m scandalized! I’ve a mind to just bring you right back home for that.”

  “And that’s where I wanted to be in the first place.”

  “Okay, forget that, Brer Rabbit. No guest bedroom now. You can sleep under the stairs.”

  “All right, I take it back. Your family isn’t weird.”

  * * *

  Vi lived in an actual cabin in the woods. To get to her place one had to head down Liberty Way to a left turn at an unmarked, well-hidden dirt road, right to the point where you reach the conclusion that you’ve made a navigational error and decide it’s time to turn around. Her place was another two hundred yards past that.

  The road extended beyond their house, up into the hills. Annie didn’t know where it ended: possibly Narnia. She never tried finding out.

  To get to the grocery store meant going back down the dirt road to a left on Liberty, then a trip through farmland—staying north of the traffic on Patience and Spaceship Road—until reaching Durgin Ave. Durgin went east-west across the northern part of Sorrow Falls, hooking up (indirectly) with the north end of Main. It would have been a viable route for Annie to take on her bike if she wanted to avoid the mess caused by Shippie, but Durgin was a narrow, shoulderless road people treated like a highway. Legally, she could have biked on it. Intellectually, it seemed a foolish idea.

  At the western edge of Sorrow Falls, right off of Durgin, was a shopping plaza that had a Super Shopper; a chain pizza place everyone despised and still ate at; a home goods store; and an empty storefront that used to have a steak house, and still had a lot of the signage up for it.

  The plaza was kind of typical for the region, which was to say it was a pavement-heavy consumer oasis that made everyone a little sad about capitalism. The Super Shopper was the largest grocer in the area, though, and while the locals had a lot of good things to say about farm stand produce—of which there was a lot—most of them got the bulk of their goods (food and otherwise) at the Super.

  Annie knew it well. Carol hadn’t been strong enough to make a proper meal more than a couple of times a week for a year or two, but she was strong enough to shop at least one Saturday a month, so on that Saturday she and Annie stocked up on frozen food, canned food, food that came in kits requiring only water and perhaps the addition of ground beef, and so on. It was all processed foods all the time: the anti-macrobiotic diet.

  Violet and Annie ended up filling a shopping cart with the kind of goods that only made sense for a frat house freezer, and then Violet paid for all of it, which was incredibly embarrassing. There was cash sitting in a box in Carol’s bedroom, and that money was for exactly this situation, but Annie forgot all about getting it before leaving. She still couldn’t believe she wasn’t going to be spending the night in her own bed, which may have been part of the problem.

  Annie didn’t recognize Dougie at all until he said hello while bagging their one-week supply of tater tots.

  “How’s it going?” he said, with that half-nod guys their age thought was cool and affecting. It was almost a shrug, almost a nod, almost nothing at all, as if to say I do not wish to expend the effort to fully acknowledge you but I can do this.

  “Oh, hey!” Annie said. “I didn’t recognize you, sorry!”

  He smiled and rubbed his hand over his head. It was not, as clai
med by the gossipers of the Oakdale Experience, a completely shaven head. He had stubble up there. It was army-standard crew cut, more or less. Still, it was a very different look.

  Doug Kozinsky—Dougie—was the same age as Annie, and in a lot of ways was a kindred spirit, in that he was a town kid of limited means, eclectic tastes and above-average intellect. But where Annie could merge with just about any clique, Dougie could barely handle eye contact. She knew him pretty well because his dad was a long-haul trucker for Hollis, and worked either with or under Annie’s father. Growing up, when her dad and Carol and Annie did things together like going to family barbecues and whatnot, they usually ended up with Dougie’s family. That made them bona fide ‘childhood friends’.

  They no longer hung out, which was more of a reflection of the change in Annie’s family dynamic than in anything Dougie did or didn’t do. She was pretty sure he saw it differently, but there was little she could do about that. She always said hi, and took the time to chat with him when he was around, and that was a lot more than most.

  “What do you think?” he asked, regarding the haircut.

  She thought he was spending too much time idolizing the local army men.

  Rude, she wrote in her imaginary sociology field notes.

  “Looks good!”

  “Thanks.”

  He blushed. Dougie was an extremely white young man, and with his light brown hair no longer fully disguising his scalp it was possible to answer the question: does blushing happen over the whole head or just the face? (The answer: yes, the whole head can blush.)

  Violet finished paying, and Dougie finished bagging and placing the bags in the cart. Annie was struggling with the question as to whether or not she should introduce him to Vi, when he grabbed Annie’s elbow.

  “Hey, you have a second?” he asked.

  “Sure, what’s up?” Annie’s eyes darted to the register and then along the bank of registers; communicating the obvious don’t you have work?

  “I’m on break in a minute, meet me out front?”

  She looked at Vi, who shrugged.

  “Sure thing, Doug.”

  They loaded the food in the trunk of the car and reconnoitered at the entrance. A few seconds later, Dougie appeared and quick-walked them around the corner, as he pulled out a cigarette.

  “You smoke?” Annie asked.

  “Yeah, you want one?” He extended the pack. Annie shook him off. He offered one to Violet, who also declined.

  “So I, uh, I don’t know how up to date you are on things, but something’s definitely up with the base,” he said.

  Annie considered herself remarkably up-to-date in that regard, but didn’t share.

  “Yeah, how so?”

  “Well here’s what I heard. I guess there was an attack the last night.”

  “An… attack? What, did the Russians arrive?”

  “No, no, no. On the base. Some grunt went nuts, and now he’s dead, and I think they’re covering it up.”

  “How do you know this?” Violet asked.

  “I know,” he said. He addressed Violet as if she had been a part of the conversation from the outset. “She knows how.”

  “Doug’s house is near the base,” Annie said.

  This wasn’t a fully adequate explanation, but it was okay for the moment. A more complete version of the story would be to say that Dougie’s back yard terminated at the army base fence on one side and at the fence to the Winterhill graveyard on the other side. According to some of the more reputable gossip, Dougie also spent an unreasonable amount of time hijacking army radio frequencies and taking notes about what he heard. A couple of years ago he got in a little trouble for marching along the perimeter of the base and pretending he was a soldier too. It would have been cute if he was still eight—they’d both played “army” when they were eight, coincidentally in the same field that now housed the base—but he was doing this at fourteen.

  “So what do you think’s going on?” Annie asked. She did not, truly, think anything was, but he did, and that was what counted for the moment.

  “Space flu,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, space… flu?” Vi asked.

  “It’s what they call it when… never mind, I’ll explain later,” Annie said.

  “Yeah, I think it’s starting to affect them, like, badly. What I hear, this guy went nutso in the barracks, and they ended up choking him or something. He was trying to kill people with his bare hands.”

  “So we should be thankful the space flu hasn’t inspired anybody to use their service revolver, you’re thinking.”

  “I’m dead serious, Annie, you should be careful. They’re already talking about a change in their training protocols. They’re also tightening things. Altering shifts and stuff. This morning they were running drills on the base I haven’t seen them run since the base went up. The bad kind of drills, like, suppression fire, crowd control, those sorts of things. I think things’ve been changing for a while only we didn’t really notice. Do you know Tina?”

  “Sure.” Tina Henneker was a classmate who’d been driving since March and was unofficially voted by the class as Most Likely To Lose Her Life Texting While Driving. It was unlikely she said anything to Dougie Kozinsky directly, but news traveled a lot of different ways.

  “She got stopped at a checkpoint, a couple of days ago.”

  Annie laughed. “C’mon, Doug, nobody gets stopped at those. I don’t think the arms on the gates even come down.”

  “I’m serious. Ask her yourself. They’re getting ready to close off the town, I’m telling you.”

  “I’ll keep my ear to the ground, dude.”

  “Look I…” he looked around in case one of the pigeons or trashcan rodents in the nearby Dumpster were feeling curious, then leaned forward and took his voice down to a whisper. “I know you were there. On the base. I saw you.”

  “Oh, that, I was just—”

  “I don’t wanna know. I’m sure you had reasons. I just want to warn you, you know. Be careful. Whatever you’ve got going on in there… I think they’re hiding a real problem. And I don’t want anything happening to you.”

  “Aw, thanks, Doug. That’s sweet. Thanks. Don’t worry, I’ll stay aware. And hey, let me know if you hear anything else.”

  * * *

  Dinner was chicken nuggets and fries, two popular frozen delicacies in the Collins household, rendered slightly less edible in Violet’s home by the absence of ketchup or any other species of condiment. It was something they hadn’t considered needing when at the Super, because as far as Annie was concerned every house had ketchup or at least a jar of prepared barbecue sauce or vinegar, or something that would pair effectively with fried things, while Violet didn’t usually eat like this at home and so hadn’t considered it.

  Susan didn’t join them. Annie assumed she’d eaten already or had plans to eat later, and until then elected to remain in the house’s study, reading a book by lamplight.

  The study was the most impressive part of the house, and Annie resolved to spend more time in it. If her own living room was an unconscious homage to old Hollywood, Violet’s study was a paean to unusual books. Annie spent a lot of time around books as a library volunteer, but Susan and Todd’s collection (Todd was Violet’s nearly-always-absent dad) had stuff she never heard of before. It was like an alternative history Twilight Zone library, covering a lot of less-than-respectable subjects, like cryptozoology and nutso assassination theories. There were also books on since-debunked scientific ideas and books on subjects that would never make it into the public library, like eugenics. It was, in short, a vast collection of wrong things. Annie couldn’t wait to jump in.

  After they ate and cleaned up—dishes were done by hand in Annie’s household, so when it turned out that was the standard in Vi’s house as well she was already prepared—and then retired to the guest bedroom, where Annie tried to get used to the idea that she was going to be spending the evening there.

  The room was sma
ll, but clean. It smelled like an alien room, though, and the sounds were all different, the air blew wrong, and basically this whole thing sucked.

  Violet seemed attuned to her friend’s discomfort.

  “Maybe we can work something out,” she said. Violet was sitting at the foot of the bed across from Annie at the head. It was a queen-sized mattress, bigger than the twin in Annie’s own room. If this were a hotel and she were there under different circumstances, she’d be pretty happy with the larger bed. “You can sleep over there on weekends or something. I’ll stay over too.”

  “You’re the same age as me.”

  “Sure. But we’ve been there alone before.”

  “Look, I’m probably gonna be pissed at Ed about this for a while, but that doesn’t mean I want him to get in any trouble, either. If he says I need to stay here with you and Susan, I probably have to.”

  “Yes, I guess you’re right.”

  * * *

  Annie couldn’t fall asleep, which was more or less as expected. After Violet left, she talked to Carol on the phone for a half an hour or so. This was a challenge, because only one part of the bedroom got any cell phone reception, and it was a part with no place to sit. It was good to hear her voice though. Annie imagined her mother was at home and Annie was the one on the trip, and that idea made it easier for some reason.

  Carol found a channel running Bringing Up Baby and the two of them spent a good amount of time quoting lines to each other. But then her mother had to get some rest, and Annie was left alone in the big strange bed with the wrong noises and smells and breeze.

  Sometime around midnight she decided to stop staring at the ceiling and tried staring out the window instead. The window was on one side of the bed, so it was possible to look through it while still retaining the comfort of being in bed, which was nice.

  The isolation of the cabin was jarring. Her own bedroom window faced the street, and while their street was essentially empty—she looked out on farmland on the other side, with the nearest neighbors to the left and right on the same side of the road—there was still a paved road there with a line down the middle and an expectation of periodic traffic.