by Nick Lake
“I don’t know how to make pancakes,” said Emily.
“Oh,” said Bob, from the bed. “Something supergirl can’t do.”
Emily hadn’t known he was awake; his eyes were closed. She rolled her eyes, even though he couldn’t see. “Ha-ha,” she said.
“I know how to make pancakes,” said Aidan.
“You do?”
“Yeah.”
“How?” She knew the answer even as the question left her mouth.
“Your mom,” he said. “She makes them every Sunday. I mean…I’ve never done it. But I know the theory.”
“I can make pancakes too,” said Bob, sitting up. “I used to—” He blinked. “I can make pancakes,” he repeated.
“Awesome,” said Emily. “You guys are cooking breakfast for me, then. It’s, like, twenty-first-century Swiss Family Robinson.”
Aidan held out his hand, and she handed him the ceramic cup, now liquid and frothy with natural yeast. He spooned half of it out, added flour and water, and stirred, making a kind of batter.
“It would be better if we had butter to fry it with,” he said, looking at the frying pan. “But—”
“Wait!” said Emily.
She was remembering the shed out back. A smart outdoorsman would dig down into the frozen ground, add some ice from the lake, maybe. Make a cold-storage unit. She pulled her sweater back on.
“You spotted a cow outside?” said Bob drily.
“LOL,” said Emily, rolling her eyes again. She went to the door. “I’ll be back in a second,” she said. “There might be butter.”
“Don’t get caught,” said Bob. “Or shot.” His tone started off jokey and then ran out of steam, fell flat. He winced. “Sorry.”
“I’ll try not to.”
She went outside, around the side of the cabin. There was a stand of aspen and elm, a low scrubby hill. No one out there that she could see, no plumes of smoke, no movement. If anyone was coming, they were keeping their distance.
When she opened the door to the small structure, yes: there were blocks of ice deep in the ground, and above them, large pieces of cured meat were hanging. Moose, it looked like. Whole haunches, nearly as big as a small person. And on the shelves above there were jars: preserves. Cranberry, she guessed. Blueberry.
Star prize.
Calorieville.
The number of hours they could survive, could go on for, was rising all the time. She almost smiled. But they were still going to have to move, and pretty soon. They couldn’t stay in the cabin forever. The smile faded. She hunted around behind the jars and found a bottle with an amber-colored liquid inside. She sniffed it—vegetable oil.
She took a jar of what she thought was blueberry jam and the bottle of oil and carried them back to the cabin.
“No butter,” she said. “But I did find these.” She held up the jar and the oil.
“Sweet,” said Bob.
Aidan took the oil, and poured some into the pan, which he was heating over the stove. Bob had found a large spoon and held the bowl of pancake batter in one hand. He gave the spoon to Aidan. “Here,” he said. “You want a full spoonful, but only one at a time. Wait till it bubbles, and then turn it over.”
Aidan nodded. He cast his eyes around. “I don’t see a…like, a flat slotted spoon with a handle? Emily’s mom had a thing. An implement. There was no word for it in her head. She just knew what it looked like.”
Emily’s mom. The words sounded so strange coming out of his mouth.
“Don’t need one,” said Bob. “We can toss ’em. I’ll show you.”
The pancake sizzled.
“Now,” said Bob.
“OK…,” said Aidan.
Bob put his hands, with Aidan’s, on the handle of the pan.
“Right,” he said. “Slide the pancake toward the far side of the pan…tilt it…yeah…and then…flip.”
They snapped the pan up together, and the pancake was in the air, turning, and then it landed on the other side.
“Cool!” said Aidan, exactly as if he really was a seven-year-old boy.
“Nice work, champ,” said Bob, punching his shoulder.
The next pancake, Aidan flipped himself. Emily watched it fluff up—the amazing alchemy of cooking. Bob slid them onto a plate when they were done, then poured the contents of the jar into the pan—blueberries, definitely—and heated them through, like a sauce.
Pancakes and blueberries: her parents had always made them on Sunday. It was a family ritual. And now they were having them, in a cabin by a lake, far from civilization—Emily and an aging pilot and an alien in a little boy’s body.
Life was weird.
Still, it was a change from hiking with nothing in their bellies, and they sat down to eat in the dim light of the cabin.
“This is good,” said Aidan.
“How would you know?” said Emily, with a smile. “You have no frame of reference.”
“I have access to a lot of memories,” he said. “And anyway, these are better than your mom’s.”
This was true. Emily’s mom was not a born cook. Emily noticed his your too. Your mom’s. Like he’d said “Emily’s mom” when he’d been talking to Bob. This was still new to her. At home, he had always just said “Mom.” With a silent our. Mostly because there was a risk they might be overhead.
Stop it, she told herself. He isn’t your brother. There’s no point wishing he was.
But that was what he did—she understood that. He made himself the thing you most wanted to protect. The thing that spoke to your heart.
For the first time she wondered something: did she even see him the same way her parents had? The same way Bob did? It was like colors, and how you could never know for sure that someone else was seeing the same ones. There were photos of Aidan: not from before, obviously, but from the time since he had appeared. Photos her parents had taken, on their phones. And they’d looked at them together, though what was to say that they’d looked at the same boy?
She thought of the bear, playing with its cub.
What did Bob see when he looked at Aidan?
But it was pointless to wonder.
Instead, she looked over at Bob, who was getting a little more color in his cheeks, now that he was eating. A very little. But still. She felt warmth toward him, a kind of spreading expansive luminosity from the glowing fire and the food in her belly, radiating out.
She was here. Aidan was here. They were alive. And Bob was part of their strange little group too.
“You’re good with him,” she said to Bob, nodding at Aidan. “The pancake flipping and stuff. You’d have made a good dad.”
Aidan tensed, next to her. Why?
And instantly: Bob’s face went black. Like, instantly.
“Yeah?” the pilot said. His usual blank expression had turned angry, his eyes narrow. “What would you know?” he asked. “You’re just a goddamn kid.”
Silence.
Aidan stared at Bob.
Emily stared at Bob.
“I…,” he began. “I mean…”
A cold wind blew out the warm embers inside Emily, and she was in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, with a man and something small she had to protect. “Come on, Aidan,” she said. “We’ll eat these outside.” She took him by the hand, led him to the door.
Bob raised a hand, to stop them, to apologize, maybe, but she ignored him.
CHAPTER 30
OUTSIDE, SHE AND Aidan sat on the log that had been placed there, cut-side up to form a kind of bench overlooking the lake. Emily ate the pancake doused in jam, sweet with sugar, tart with berries, and she didn’t think about the taste at all, even though some dim part of her registered that it was good. Only about surviving. Only about fueling herself, to get Aidan to safety.
“You don’t n
eed to be afraid of him,” said Aidan.
She turned to her little brother, surprised.
“I’ve touched him,” he said. “I’ve seen inside him.”
“Hmm,” she said. She was thinking of Brad. Of how he always had people laughing around him, of how he could be charming so much of the time. How violence could lurk inside someone.
Of course, Bob wasn’t Brad. For one thing, he wasn’t even charming on the outside. He was pretty much always grumpy—maybe this was just a kind of extreme extension of that? And Aidan…he wouldn’t be wrong, would he? He couldn’t be. People couldn’t hide their true selves from him. Their souls. If there was such a thing. Emily wasn’t as convinced on that score as her parents.
But good soul or not, Bob had been weird there.
Movement, fast and flickering, and she looked up, startled.
To her surprise, a camp robber bird fluttered down from the trees behind the cabin, stood on the fork she’d left on the plate, and started pecking at the pancake. It snagged a whole blueberry and carried it back to a branch. Chirruped.
Huh.
Someone had stayed here a lot, she realized. Someone who had eaten out here often—often enough for the camp robber to get used to people. She watched its little fast-twitching eyes, its compact body. Soon it flew down again and took a big piece of pancake. She thought it would probably eat from her hand, if she gave it the chance. She had a hunch it had been hand-fed before.
It was strange, but not in a bad way: the proximity, the tameness, of something wild and alive. Something alien.
She looked up at the sky. Clouds were gathering on the peaks, as if the mountains were breathing. The lake was as still as the surface of the moon.
A cough, from behind them. She turned, and Bob was leaning against the doorframe. He was trying to make it look casual, but she could tell he could hardly stand without support; it was in the set of his muscles. She knew about muscles: she had trained hers to do things they wouldn’t naturally do, to carry out poses and make movements that used hidden strength to convey softness, to convey grace.
“I said I have no kids,” said Bob, unprompted. “Well…I don’t have any. But I had one.”
She watched him; there were no words inside her, nothing she could say.
“We had one,” he went on, looking up at the sky. “A boy.”
Beside her, Aidan breathed out. He touched Emily’s hand.
Emily looked at him. Their eyes met. She knew that he had seen this already, that he knew it.
She turned back to Bob.
She watched his face. It didn’t show anything; didn’t reveal anything. It was like the middle of the lake: iced over. But his eyes: his eyes were like holes cut into the ice, in winter, to get water from deep below, and she was afraid of what might move down there.
She had to turn away, to look at the lake. At the edges it was all water, clear water, with fish in it no doubt. Was there a fishing line in the cabin? Lures? She bet there was. She could try to catch them a fish.
But she had to turn back, at some point. To look at Bob.
“You had?” she said eventually. She put a light stress on the word had.
“Yep,” said Bob.
“I’m so sorry,” said Emily. “I shouldn’t have…If I’d known, I would never—”
“No,” said Bob. “I’m the one who’s sorry. None of that is on you. I shouldn’t have snapped like that.”
She took a deep breath, smiled. “Forget about it,” she said. “It’s like it never happened.”
Bob looked into her eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. That’s the worst thing of all.”
He didn’t say anything else.
After a time, he went back into the cabin.
CHAPTER 31
NIGHT WAS ALREADY falling, the short spring day coming to an end, and Emily and Aidan were still sitting outside the cabin. They should be on the move, they should be running away, but it was like they were in dreamland, outside of time.
She was thinking that they should probably go inside, where it was warmer, but the stars were so beautiful: splattered spangling across the sky. She was wrapped in her sweater, but the cold was sneaking in around the edges, and into her lungs.
“I’ll get us a blanket,” said Aidan. It was like he was reading her mind. He probably was, actually.
She knew she should go in, but right then, with the stars above, she found she couldn’t move. “OK,” she said.
Aidan went into the cabin and came back out. “I think he’s sleeping,” he said. “Bob, I mean.”
Like there was another he. Like there was anyone else with them.
“Good,” she said.
Aidan had brought a blanket, which he spread over them both. He was also holding Goober under his arm, the monkey’s head poking out.
Emily frowned. She was remembering the plane, when he’d gone back for it. “You really like that thing, huh?”
Aidan looked at her, puzzled. “Of course. You gave him to me.”
A firework bursting in her heart, bright splatter of colors. She’d never have believed it—what you could feel for someone so new. Someone so small.
She scooted over—there wasn’t much space on the bench, but he was small, of course, and he sat close to her. They didn’t speak for a while. He leaned against her.
She put her arm around him and was taken aback as always by the marblelike temperature, the alabaster feel of him—he was colder than a normal person, but not because he was sick; he always had been. She didn’t know if it was part of his nature, if his kind ran colder than people, if their bodies worked in a different way, or if they just came from a warmer planet. Aidan had said it was hard to explain, that not all evolutionary strategies were the same and not all environments were the same and not all life was carbon-based, or something, but he’d lost her.
She didn’t really care—what she cared about was keeping him alive. He was the one who really needed to stay warm or they would never get anywhere, he would never get home.
“We can’t stay out here much longer,” she said.
“I know,” he said.
Ahead of them, the lake was a dark mirror, reflecting the mountains and the stars; the water so still and clear that if you were spun around, you would find it difficult to know which were the real ones and which were only a trick of the light. Above, the nearly full moon glowed through a ring of cloud, a borehole, bright in the black of the sky.
An owl called from the woods nearby, maybe the same one as the previous night—the sort of lonely sound that made you feel sad but also glad of the person next to you, of the cabin behind you. She looked down at Aidan. He was squeezing Goober tight and looking around, transfixed, his eyes wide, taking in the scene.
She looked too, seeing it through his eyes, seeing it fresh and new, as if she’d never seen it before.
“It’s beautiful,” said Aidan.
Meaning:
The lake. The mountains. The stars. The snow.
“I know,” she said.
“Look, Goober,” he said, holding up the stuffed toy. “We will need to remember this, when we’re gone.” He was being deliberately dramatic, deliberately funny, but she knew he meant it.
The words cut her, but she smiled. Goober. She didn’t know where the name had come from. Goober, though: she knew where he had come from. She’d bought him for Aidan. It was the day after he had arrived, and they were in her room.
“You have a lot of stuffed bears,” he’d said, looking at her shelves.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “From my parents, when I was little. I used to love them.”
“What are they for?” he said.
She looked at him. “For?”
“Yes.”
“They’re not for anything. They’re just…toys. To—I don’t k
now—hold. And you kind of pretend they’re alive and look after them. When I was a kid, I had them all in my bed, like it was a big sleepover, and I would have tea parties with them.”
He went over and picked up a small teddy. “We have nothing like this,” he said. “Our toys are…mechanical, I think, is the correct word. To teach how things work.”
“Like toy cars? Construction sets? We have those too,” she’d said.
He looked into the eyes of the teddy. “But these are different,” he said. He cocked his head to one side, appraising the bear. “This is a toy to teach love.”
She blinked.
She’d never thought of it that way.
“Yeah…,” she said. Thinking of how she’d carried one bear, Mr. Ruffles, everywhere with her, until one of his eyes fell out and he was dirty and matted all over. “You’re right. I guess.”
When he put the teddy back on the shelf, she could see the reluctance in his movements.
“Would you like one of your own?” she’d said.
And an hour later they were in the general store, and he was picking out a monkey: Goober. That was the last of her babysitting money from Minnesota.
Now, by the mostly frozen lake, Aidan held the monkey close to him and watched the mountains. “It’s strange to me,” he said, “that instead of enjoying this place, you people always want to fight over who owns it.”
“Not me,” she said.
“No. Not you.”
They didn’t say anything for a long time. Emily could feel her muscles stiffening. She knew she needed to go inside, check on the fire, keep it burning low all night.
“You still think we can get there—to the antenna place?” she said.
“I think we can,” said Aidan. A very faint stress on we. There was something unspoken there: but not Bob.
“Not if we stay here,” she said.
“No.”
“So we should see how things stand in the morning. And then keep moving.”
“Yes.”
Emily looked up at the mountainside where they had come down, the valley and the snow field above. “They will still be after us.”
“Yes.”