by Nick Lake
“But we’ll get you home.”
He smiled at her. “Well,” he said. “My other home.”
She felt herself welling up. She hugged him. Right now, she was in an amazing place, far from home, and she wasn’t alone.
“Do you think they’ll ever give up?” she said. “On finding you?”
A fantasy: She and Aidan, exploring. Going to New York. London. Paris. She could dance, or learn to, properly, and he could…well, her mom could come along too—her dad as well, she guessed—maybe they could homeschool him and—
“No,” he said. “They’ll never stop.”
“Never?”
“They don’t understand me,” he said. “And when they don’t understand, it makes them anxious. They will not rest until they have detained me and can examine me. That’s what my…my mother says.”
“I don’t understand any of this.” Emily waved her hand at the snowy peaks of the mountains, the faint ripples on the surface of the lake. “It doesn’t bother me that I don’t. I don’t need to examine it.”
“And that’s why I like you,” said Aidan.
She smiled.
Her breath was freezing in her nostrils—she could feel it. She shivered.
“You need to move,” said Aidan. “For warmth.”
She turned to the door. “Yes. We should go in.”
“Or…,” he said. “That thing you were doing, when we first camped? When you put out your leg? Maybe you should do that.”
She gave him a look, like, Seriously? He was being coy, that was why: he knew exactly what he meant, he’d looked inside her. That thing you were doing. He knew very well what she’d given up, what she’d stopped, when they came to Alaska.
“No,” she said. “We need sleep. Tomorrow, maybe.”
“There is only now,” he said. “So dance.”
CHAPTER 32
SHE LOOKED OUT at the flat-pebbled shore. To dance, amid such beauty. Yes—why not? After all, tomorrow they might be dead. Tomorrow Aidan might be gone. Bob was sleeping. It wasn’t like they could leave now anyway.
“OK,” she said. “But then we go in. It’s too cold for you out here.”
She got up, stretched her thigh muscles, her hamstrings. Touched her toes; caught her ankle and held one leg behind her head, then the other.
After that she walked toward the lake. She walked on her toes, beginning to flex her legs. She trailed one foot: leaned down and into a turn, sweeping her other foot around; then a light leap and her arms went out, and she was spinning.
She closed her eyes, letting her muscles remember. She went into something from her old class in Minnesota: a modern piece, a reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet. The movements all about longing, about holding on to something. She made her back a bow, she made her body an arc, and she threw herself into the dance.
That made it sound easy; it wasn’t. Her legs ached, her lungs burned. In one way that maybe neither of them had known, she and her mother were alike, she realized: one of the things she loved about dancing was that it was hard; it was hard, and it hurt, and you had to work and work for only small improvements, incremental, eked out with suffering.
And, in return, the floating; the grace.
She opened her eyes: snow was beginning to fall, the flakes almost suspended in the air. She felt as though she were in a diorama. A snow globe. Her arms swooped, straight, her wrists and fingers extended, as she’d been taught, and she jumped and turned and spun, her feet light over the pebbles, as if gravity might let her go, if she forgot about it.
The ground was cold, the stones were cold, but she put a hand down, came to a stop on her knees. Then put her weight onto that hand; uncoiled herself, twisting, pushing herself up just with that hand, a kind of backflip in slow motion, until her toes just touched the ground—
The idea was that it would look slow, look graceful, look like fluidity and ease and no effort, when the reality was that it hurt, it burned, and you felt like you were going to break, but then—
She landed it, transferring the weight to her feet, and straight into a smoother, quicker backflip, one hand on the ground as a pivot, and then—overcome with the love she’d found in the choreography, not in her heart, though it was in her heart too—she collapsed on her side.
She was breathing hard.
She stretched, feeling the singing of her muscles. The snow was still falling, lit by the moonlight: as if she were among the stars. The lake gleamed.
Aidan set Goober carefully on the little bench and walked down to the beach, his hand out.
“Show me?” he said.
And so she did: she took his hands and pulled him into a turn. She couldn’t do what she’d just done, with him, but she danced a waltz: taking the man’s part, leading, so that he could feel the flow and the rhythm. She whirled him around, the two of them dancing together in their enormous snow globe, the mountains framing it all, the lake a mirror for the waning moon.
He laughed; he laughed and kept laughing, and she lifted him so that she could skate his feet along the ground, so that he could really feel the grace of it, the almost weightlessness when you were inside the dance—
And then she looked down and saw that her feet were a little above the ground, and then they were above the stones of the beach, in the air, cushioned by it, and turning, turning, and—
“Are you doing this?” she said, and—
“Yes,” he said.
They were flying: not high, but not touching the earth, either; they were in the snow, part of the snow, suspended and whirling and dancing, in blue light. They were energy in movement, no effort at all now, all the ease of the dance without any of the pain—they were drifting, they were flurry; they were eddies in the air made into bodies; they were snowflakes.
She had been holding him up, and now he was holding her up. The snow hanging in the air revealed the depth of the world; how far back it went, in every direction, sparkling with white dots in black space.
This moment.
This:
This was the best thing, in all her life.
Then, slowly, they drifted back down, and landed on the pebbles. Emily held him tight.
“Was that real?” she said.
“As anything,” he answered.
She was cold; so was he. That was why he’d stopped, probably. But still she didn’t go inside, not just yet. She held him, and she tried to hold the moment too: to capture the night and the view and the smell of pine in her mind and the snow—trying to fix it, so she could return to this moment in the future if she wanted to, this moment out of time. She held her eyes open, unblinking, and drew it all toward her, the water, the sky, the moon, the trees.
She closed her eyes. Already it was murky in her mind—a Polaroid of a Polaroid, the detail lost.
That was the thing: the world was beautiful, but you couldn’t take it with you. Maybe that was why some people wanted to own bits of it, to have paper putting it in their names. But that was only a kind of delusion. You just had to stay in it, all the time, in the moment, and you couldn’t do that when you were always running away.
She held his hand, and they went inside.
On the way he picked up Goober. His people didn’t have toys to teach them love. But maybe they didn’t need them.
Or maybe they did.
Maybe that was what she was for.
CHAPTER 33
AS SOON AS the sun rose, they should have been running, they should have been on the move, but Emily found herself strangely reluctant to leave the cabin. They were warm there, they had food, they had a view of the lake and the steep rise behind them, and it would be hard for anyone to sneak up on them. Of course, they’d have to go eventually: Bob needed proper medical treatment.
They had to go that day, actually. Keeping the fire burning when the sky
was dark, when the smoke would be visible from far away—it had been far too risky already. To do it again would be madness.
But for now, when Emily got up, there was a stove, flour, jam, and a seat to sit on, and those things pulled at her, like the surface of the earth, like gravity.
Actually, morning was a stretch: it was nearly noon, by her G-Shock.
OK.
OK, they would eat again, take full advantage of the food at the cabin, and then they would move. Take the canoe, maybe, and head farther west. Try to keep out of sight, though that wouldn’t be easy with the early spring foliage.
While Bob snored and Aidan slept too—or seemed to sleep; he was lying facing the wall, totally quiet and motionless—she searched the cupboards and drawers. She had had an idea she might find a fishing rod or a line, and she was right: in the far left drawer of the dresser near the door was a set of lures and a rolled-up line. No rod—but she wouldn’t need one if she found a good enough stick.
Bob sat up, rubbing his eyes, in what would have been a funny cartoon cliché of tiredness if he hadn’t had worryingly dark circles under his eyes. His skin was pale too.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” she said. “You want pancakes?”
“Always. You making them?” An edge of irony in his voice. But not a sharp edge.
“Nope,” she said. “I was going to get Aidan to do it.”
They smiled at each other. And that was it: friends again.
Aidan, apparently hearing his name, got up. It was that abrupt: one of the things he had not learned about humans was that people insert hesitancy into their movements—interludes, breaks, pauses. They pantomime waking up, for example, with little stretches and turns of their necks, rubbing their eyes, before actually standing—it was something Emily hadn’t really noticed until Aidan revealed it by its absence.
What he did was: he sat up, then stood up, and walked over to her, with no parentheses in between the actions.
Just: done.
She held up the fishing line, to show him and Bob.
“I thought we could try the lake after that,” she said. “There should be trout. Arctic char.”
“Fishing!” said Aidan. “I’ve never done it.”
“You’ve never done most things.”
Aidan took a lure from her and examined it. “Your father’s father took him fishing when he was a boy.”
“How do you— Oh.”
He had touched her father’s skin, and absorbed his memories—that was how he knew. She was always forgetting he could do that. It wasn’t that she was stupid—at least, she hoped not. It was that it wasn’t something people were meant to be able to do.
That he wasn’t a person—that was the other obvious thing she kept forgetting.
“Fishing is a thing that fathers like to show their sons,” Aidan continued. “I have gathered that from films.”
Emily glanced over at Bob, who looked down at his boots, lacing them laboriously, looking down almost aggressively, not meeting her eye. She was sorry for what he’d lost, but she couldn’t help feeling on edge when he got that look of pain and anger.
Finally the pilot raised his head. As it turned out, there was no anger: there was a faraway look to him, as if he were in the room but something behind his eyes was in another place, another time. “You don’t want to keep moving? To send that signal?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Emily. “But we need rest too. And food. The men in black don’t seem to be on our tails right now.”
“Based on what? Taking a look at the scenery?”
The embarrassing answer was: yes. “I…well. I didn’t see any movement.”
“Wonderful,” said Bob. “You didn’t see anything, so it must be safe. You remember their white suits, right? Their helicopter? These people are not amateurs. And you shouldn’t stay in one place too long.”
“Not we?”
A pause.
“Huh?” said Bob.
“You said you. Not we.”
He touched his arm, where the wound was. “I don’t think I’ll be going much farther.”
She must have looked stricken; her alarm must have showed on her face.
“Not dying,” said Bob. “I don’t think. But I might have to stay here while you carry on. I’ll call for help once you’re far enough away. That way they can’t get to you through me.”
“How are you going to call for help? There’s no radio.”
“I’ll think of something.”
“No,” she said. “You come with us.”
He stepped forward, put a hand on her arm, lightly. “Come on,” he said. “You know what I’m saying is right. You just don’t want to admit it.”
For a moment she just stood there, breathing.
Finally, nodded. “Yeah. Maybe. I guess.” It was true. She’d known it, in the deepest part of her, in the core beneath the mantle of herself, but hadn’t wanted to voice it. They had to leave him here. “But…not yet.”
Aidan handed back the lure. “Later we’ll get going,” he said. “First we’ll fish.”
Emily and Bob turned to him, together, synchronized. Like: The alien kid is in charge now? A weird moment of solidarity.
“The men are not coming—not now,” said Aidan.
“You know that?”
Aidan looked calmly at Emily. “Yes. At least, I know they’re not in the immediate vicinity. Also, protein would be good for you. It sustains for longer than carbohydrate. The body has to break it down into glycogen first.”
“Um. Right,” she said.
So: they fished. They cut two lengths of line and went out the door, careful to shut it firmly behind them to keep the warmth in the cabin, then walked down the pebble beach to the shore. Emily took one length of line and Bob the other. He limped along the edge of the water a little, and Aidan—she was interested to see—followed him.
She tied one end of the line to a short stick, then a lure to the other end. She cast it into the glass-clear water, as far into the lake as she could manage, and pulled it slowly back toward her. Nothing.
She hugged herself to keep warm; an eye always on the landscape around them, looking out for the men in black. She also watched Bob and Aidan, twenty feet away. Bob was saying something, she couldn’t make out what, but Aidan was looking up at the pilot, totally intent on what he was telling him. It made her feel a warm constriction inside; she didn’t quite know why. Bob got Aidan to tie on a lure, and they threw it out into the lake together, and Bob showed him how to draw it back in.
She turned back to her own line: threw out the lure and gathered it.
Nothing happened.
Rags of clouds clung to the snowy peaks all around.
Then:
As sudden as a phone call in a silent house, a fish struck. She was pulling the lure back and it was flashing through the water, small and silvery over the stones, when a shadow detached itself from a dark part of the lake’s bottom and shot after it. She had an impression of an opening mouth, and then the gleam of the lure winked into invisibility as the fish swallowed it.
She pulled on the line—the fish rolled, hard, sending a small wave up onto the pebbles at her feet. She stepped back, stepped back again, yanking on the line, turning it onto the stick to shorten it and tire the fish, which thrashed violently, turning the water white.
Eventually she pulled it up onto the stones, the water shockingly, stingingly cold against her fingers, and she bent to pick up a large one: she noticed that Bob and Aidan had come to watch as she brought the stone down on the fish’s head and stopped it flipping and twisting. A lake trout, maybe eighteen inches. Bright yellow fins; green sides.
Bob straightened, and winced. “Now we’ve got to get one to match, son,” he said to Aidan.
They walked off. She wond
ered if he knew he had used that word.
They did get one to match: actually, they got two, and she didn’t catch another. But three trout were enough to make a good meal.
She wandered over to them when Bob pulled the second fish from the lake and laid it on a flat rock. Aidan crouched down. The light was low and made the expanse of water beside them seem like something made of metal. Aidan touched the twisting trout, closed his eyes for a moment, then stood.
“Strange,” he said.
“What?”
“That thing is more alien to you than I am,” he said. “It lived in a different world. This is the first time it has felt weight.”
She couldn’t tell if he was sad or not.
Bob brought down a rock, and the trout went still.
In the cabin, she let Bob dress the fish. He was exhausted now, face gray, but it was a job he could do sitting down, and he wanted to show Aidan how it was done. The boy sat next to him as he gutted each fish with the Swiss Army knife, drawing out their bright, glistening entrails. Funny how she kept thinking of him as a boy.
One of the fish had a mouse in its stomach. She’d seen that before, on camping trips with her parents. Always amazed her: how did a mouse get in there? Fell into the lake, she supposed: a fatal mistake.
She felt a little like that mouse right now: not in her proper element, despite what Bob had said. Pursued. Perhaps to be caught, and killed, by something hiding in the shadows.
She shook her head, shaking the thought away. Bob gave her a plate with the entrails on it, and she threw them outside; they steamed when they hit the air. The little camp robber flashed down from a tree, lit on the guts, and pecked at them.
She went back inside and heated the pan and fried the fish. Eating them, hot, off the wooden plates from the dresser, reminded her of something she had known as a child—food you caught tasted better. It was sweet, and yet mineral, the flesh of the trout.
“This is good,” said Bob. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” said Emily.
“It tastes like stones,” said Aidan, marveling. “And salt, and rain.”