The Other by Marilyn Peake
Page 13
I and my new assigned partner, Zander, would be gods. That had to be a whole lot better than being viewed as demons.
PART 4
Jade Whitaker
Chapter 14
I started watching the news on my flight to Roswell, but turned it off and watched a daytime talk show instead. The news was covering a story about people who had lost their ability to concentrate and started having hallucinations after a bright light exploded over Roswell, New Mexico—exactly where I was headed. Several doctors commented on the situation, saying they thought this was the result of an alien virus. I did not need to hear that. It scared the living daylights out of me every time I thought I might catch a virus that would scramble my mind. I already felt scared to death that I had cancer. The talk show was all about people who had silly dance moves. Now, that I could handle.
When I finally got to Roswell, I took a taxi to my hotel. It was the cheapest hotel I could find that was close to the compound where my biological mother was doing research.
There were stencils of silly-looking aliens with green skin, huge heads and large black eyes on the windows of the reception building. Faded by the sun, they were seriously out of date. No one thought goofy alien images were funny anymore. People were afraid. Recent comic strips showed them with fangs, and horrible red rashes to illustrate the virus they had brought to Earth with them.
The guy at the check-in desk seemed to hate his job. He didn’t smile, just robotically went through everything he had to do for each customer. Name? Looking at his computer: Yes, we have your reservation. Here are your keys. Breakfast is served in the room across the hallway from 8:00 AM to 11:00 AM every morning. I’m required to warn you to be careful about a virus that may be spreading in this area. If you feel exceptionally dizzy or experience hallucinations, we suggest you contact Public Health to report your symptoms and find a doctor. He pushed a pamphlet toward me. Here’s a list of local Urgent Care facilities. Anything else I can do for you?
Wow. How many times had he repeated that spiel? He seemed positively bored by it all. Hello. You might catch a virus here that will infect your mind and drive you crazy. But, hey, have a nice day. Most likely, he didn’t believe all the rumors about the alien virus. Not everyone did. Also, he seemed fine. When you feel healthy, you tend to think you’re invulnerable to stuff.
I took the key and found my room. It was OK. It had a bed and a chair and an air conditioner/heater unit. That’s pretty much all I needed. I hoped to God there weren’t any bedbugs. Those were definitely real and they could give you some pretty nasty bites.
I lay down on the bed just to take a short nap, but fell asleep for hours. I was woken up by the most intense pain I’d ever experienced in my right side. I felt petrified. I was in a strange town where I didn’t know anyone and didn’t have a regular doctor. I curled up into a fetal position and rocked back and forth, trying not to scream or moan too loudly. When the pain finally lessened enough to stand up, I went into the bathroom and took a shower, letting the warm water relax my muscles that had tensed up while I fought through the pain.
The next day, I took a taxi to The Astral Plane compound. I should have watched the local news first. There was police tape across the front yard and cop cars everywhere. The police refused to let me onto the property.
Two guys in orange astronaut-looking jumpsuits were hanging around outside the area marked off by the tape. They seemed to be deep in discussion. They kept gesturing emphatically with their hands. I walked over to them and said, “Hello. I’m looking for my mother, Dr. Cora Frost. I have a very important message for her. I’ve been trying to reach her, but haven’t had any luck. I flew all the way across the country to find her. It’s a family emergency.”
I hoped to God they’d never repeat exactly what I’d said to her. She’d think I was a lunatic, probably refuse to ever have anything to do with me.
The taller of the two guys said, “Yeah. Reception’s really bad out here. Plus I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the police haven’t blocked our signals. They’re treating us like we’ve all committed murder.”
I was going to ask if someone had been murdered, but I decided against it. I really didn’t want to know. I was scared to death over this whole trip and I didn’t need anything else making me too frightened to go through with finding my biological mother. I was here. If I didn’t do this now, I’d probably never do it.
The shorter guy said, “I can take you to your mother if you want.”
I asked, “Is she inside?”
He said, “No. She’s not here. She’s just down the road a bit.”
I said, “Sure. Thanks.”
I followed him to an old beat-up black van with desert dust all over the lower half. I climbed in. Normally, I would never hop into a van with a stranger, but these weren’t normal times.
He drove to a barn out in the middle of the desert. I couldn’t see another building anywhere in sight. He pointed at it and said, “She’s in there. I gotta get back, but I’m sure she’ll take care of you.”
I hesitated a moment. What if she wasn’t in the barn? What if this was a trap? What if there wasn’t any cell phone reception out here? I’d be stranded. This was the desert. I’d die from dehydration.
Then I have no idea what came over me, but I said to myself that it was now or never and stop being such a coward. I opened the van door and climbed out. The driver turned off the engine, walked me over to the barn and opened a side door. I heard voices inside the building. The driver said, “Go on in. I have to get back.”
I stepped inside. The floor was covered with straw, which felt soft under my shoes. I walked around a stack of hay bales and came out into the open area of the barn. There were three people there…and two aliens.
Oh, my God. They were real…
I froze. My heart raced out of control. I wanted to run, but there was nowhere to go, other than to die running across an empty desert. I felt desperate. I shouted, “Is Dr. Cora Frost here?” There was only one woman. Either she was Cora Frost, or I had made a terrible mistake getting in that van and coming over here.
The woman said, “I’m Dr. Frost. Who are you?”
I said, “I’m your daughter, Jade Whitaker. I need your help.”
She literally rolled her eyes. She said, “Are you stalking me? I have no legal connection to you. I’ve received your text messages. I was ignoring them on purpose.”
At that moment, it felt like my abdomen was going to rip wide open. I grabbed my side and screamed bloody murder. The pain had gotten progressively worse. It was now unbearable.
One of the aliens placed her hand on my mother’s shoulder. In a gentle female voice, she said, “Wait. She really is in trouble.”
She walked over to me, this tall green creature with enormous black eyes, and said, “I can help you. I’m a doctor. Do you mind if I touch your stomach, to see what’s wrong?”
In too much pain to speak, I shook my head no. I meant: I don’t mind. If that had been interpreted to mean the opposite, I would have shook my head yes. Tears streamed down my face.
Apparently, the creature knew what I meant. She placed her hands on my abdomen.
Images flew up into the air in front of me. No one else seemed to notice them. There was a doll-like baby, only partially formed, with hair down to its knees. A beating heart stopped beating. Women were giving birth to green-skinned babies; nurses kept taking them away. Black people and one of the aliens hung from a tree, nooses tightened around their necks. Dogs snarled, barked, bared monstrous teeth. I saw windswept lands and rising seas. People begging for food. There was a spaceship hurtling through an explosion of light.
The alien said, “I’m going to focus. Do the same. Tell me what you see.” Her fingers felt warm and comforting against my stomach.
All the images disappeared except two: the partially formed doll baby, straggly hair flowing like a mop down to its knees, and a beating heart which stopped beatin
g. I described what I saw.
The alien said, “That’s what’s inside of you. It’s a vestigial twin.”
What?
When I didn’t answer out loud, she said, “Your mother…Dr. Frost…had been pregnant with twins. The other twin became absorbed into your body while you were both forming inside the womb. It’s been there since before you were born. It’s been growing, even though its brain isn’t formed. The cells have just kept multiplying. It has to come out or you will die. It’s on your ovary.”
I felt extraordinarily dizzy. I said, “I’m going to faint.”
The alien said, “You’ll be OK. I’m a medical doctor. We have a surgical room inside our spaceship. I can remove the twin right now with techniques more advanced than any other you have access to. You’ll have a better outcome. You could do us a huge favor as payment. You saw images of dying lands, am I right?”
I shook my head yes.
She said, “That is Earth where I come from. I’m not a creature from another planet. I’m a human being from the future. Our bodies are green because we now produce some of our own food inside our bodies through photosynthesis, just like plants.” She bent her head into her hands. Two black disks popped off her face. I felt completely freaked out. I thought those were her eyes! It turned out they were special AI lenses. She continued, “See. I have human eyes.” Her eyes were green and very human. She said, “We need to splice our genes once again. We’re in very big trouble. If we don’t get back some of the genetic material from your time period, the entire human race will die. Your twin would supply many stem cells. If we remove her from your body, may we take her with us? She won’t survive outside of you, but she could save the human race.”
I was stunned by all this. I blurted out a rather mundane question: “How do you know it’s a girl?”
She said, “Along with our photosynthetic genes came the side effect of having such extreme empathy we can read each other’s thoughts and feelings. That bothers most humans from your era. It scrambles their minds, and receiving images from our brains makes them feel like they’ve gone mad and are experiencing hallucinations. Your mother and you were both twins. You already know how to share thoughts with a similar mind. It’s why we can communicate with both of you. I know you have a girl twin inside you because I can see it.”
At that moment, pain gripped me so hard, I thought my stomach was going to tear open or my ovary explode. I said, “Yes! Just do it. Do the surgery. Take the twin.”
The other alien-like creature did something that made a UFO appear in a corner of the barn. This was all so surreal! These people looked like all the pictures I’d ever seen of aliens from outer space. Their ship looked like a typical UFO.
The woman who’d been talking to me took me by the hand. Her fingers were long and slender. She led me to a surgical room. I lay down on an operating room table. She gave me something to drink. That’s all I remember.
When I woke up, I felt amazing. I checked my stomach. A completely healed scar! In the future, doctors apparently know how to heal us quickly. That’s one thing future generations can look forward to.
I found that I’d been moved to a bed in a different room than the one where the surgery had been performed. The green woman stepped into the room, black lenses once again covering her eyes. She said, “You’re awake. Everything went great. There’s someone here to see you.” Before she left the room, she added, “By the way, my name’s Paloma.”
A few minutes later, Cora Frost walked into my recovery room. She said, “Maybe we can work together. Not very many people have seen what we’ve seen. I plan to write a book and I’m going to try to land a TV show. Are you interested?”
It wasn’t exactly a hug for a long-lost daughter, but I’d take whatever I could get. A green woman from the future had been much more of a mother to me than my own biological mother who was bound to me by blood and the era in which we lived. Paloma had comforted me and eased my pain. Hopefully, my relationship with my biological mother would grow over time.
Paloma returned. She asked, “Do you want to see what I removed from your body?”
I hadn’t expected that. I was shocked and frightened to look at it, but I said, “Sure.”
Once again, Paloma left the room. She came back carrying a jar filled with clear green liquid. Placing it on the bed next to me, she said, “This is the twin whose stem cells will save the future of the human race.”
I looked at the creature floating inside the jar. She was exactly like the scraggly doll image I’d seen in my mind, but with more detail. Crooked teeth and long stiff hair hung down from what looked like a leather stick. A shorter stick protruded from that one, perhaps a partially formed arm or leg. I tried to imagine her as a whole girl, as a sister I could have played and fought with, and grown into adulthood with.
An image entered my mind. I saw thousands of little green-skinned girls who all had my brown eyes. My twin sister’s brown eyes. We had thousands of siblings we would never know. For someone who had grown up as an only child and lost her mother so early into adulthood, the thought of such a large family seemed magical.
Paloma said, “Wait here.”
She left with the jar.
When she came back, she handed me and Cora what looked like transparent glass rocks—one for each of us. Encased within each were two long twisted hairs.
Paloma said, “My gift to both of you: relics to mark the connection between your generation and future generations.” To me, she said, “Two hairs from your sister’s head.” To Cora, she said, “Two hairs from your deceased twin’s head. Does she have a name?”
Cora said, “I had been torn between two names for Jade: Jade or Sapphire. I had a twin sister named Crystal whose death was extremely traumatic for me. I wanted to give my child a gem name, like hers. In memory of my sister. Jade’s twin should be named Sapphire.”
I thought of Max Davenport, my hoarder client. Death and loss devastate us all. We’re all hoarders deep down, tucking away artifacts to remind us of the people we’ve been close to and the people we’ve loved. My biological mother had named me after the twin sister she’d lost. I was in a way a walking, talking, breathing artifact from an earlier time in her life. I clutched the relic in my hand. Sapphire was a bridge between my past and my future. She was a bridge between the past and future of the entire human race.
I pictured a long line of people waiting to see the glass rock in my hand, long after I had died and left it behind. All the people had green skin. A metal plaque on the front of a clear box containing the stone said:
Relic of Sapphire Frost. To Cora Frost and her twin daughters, Sapphire and Jade, we owe the continued survival of the human race.
I learned something that day. You never know where you’ll find family. Sometimes it’s in the strangest place.
****
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y Marilyn Peake