Nowhere on Earth

by Nick Lake

  “I see,” said the man. “Yes. Yes. We can drive you to Anchorage in the jeep.” He raised a hand to the men sitting inside it, and one of them opened his door and got out. “We’ll arrange a plane from there.”

  “Thank you,” said Emily’s dad. His brow was furrowed, like there was something that just wasn’t adding up but he couldn’t see what it was.

  Her parents walked to the jeep, almost in a trance. Emily started to follow them, but the man in the suit stepped up next to her in a way that she knew was meant to make her stop, and the annoying thing was, it did.

  “I’m sorry for your ordeal,” he said. “The plane crash. Everything.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  A pause.

  “A mercy your little brother was not injured, either.” He said it so lightly, so quickly. Clever. She could see how it might work, on the right person.

  She pulled her face into confusion. “I don’t have a little brother,” she said.

  His face remained very still, watching hers. He blinked, once.

  “Perhaps I misheard the news,” he said eventually. He spoke slowly, but his eyes moved all the time. They were eyes that, she imagined, were always looking for something to analyze.

  Like her.

  “I guess,” she said after a pause. “Can I go now?”

  He held an arm out, showing the way. “I was never going to stop you.”

  She didn’t say anything. She left him behind. Then she turned. No one could hear them from the jeep.

  “You can make things happen, right?” she said.

  He didn’t say anything for the longest time; awareness crackled between them, electrifying the air; then he nodded slightly.

  “Bob. The pilot. He’s up at the lake, still. Or Mountain Rescue may have got to him. Anyway. Make sure he’s OK.”

  “Yes,” he said. No hesitation. “I will.”

  Another pause.

  “I may come and speak to you, one day,” he said. “If that’s all right. About…the crash. About your experience. For…academic interest.”

  She thought about that. He was watching her. His eyes were not unkind. And there was a force behind them, that kinetic thing, spinning, whirring. She almost…admired it. She had never met anyone like this before. Not in her small town.

  “Why?” she said. She let it creep into her voice: that she knew that he knew that she knew. It was so dizzying, the layers of it.

  “I think you are very interesting,” he said. “A very interesting person, indeed.”

  “OK,” she said. “But why would I want to speak to you?”

  She kept her eyes on him. If he said the wrong thing, it would be over, and he knew it, and knew that she knew that he knew it, and she saw the moving machine, all its parts so densely packed and spinning, all its cogs and gears, behind those gray eyes of his.

  “We can make stolen pickup trucks go away,” he said. “Think of what else we can—”

  “That had better not be a threat,” she said. “Think of what I can do too. Think of what I can tell.”

  “I was going to say: think of what else we can do to help you,” he said. “You want to get out of your little town, right? I’ve seen your social media. We can help with that.”

  She kept her eyes trained on his. “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I don’t lie,” he said.

  His eyes didn’t move. He was telling the truth. She knew it, somehow. And anyway it was nice that there was someone else who knew what had really happened. Who remembered. It kept Aidan there, in some kind of a way.

  “I probably don’t have much choice,” she said. “I mean, you know where I live.” She rolled her eyes, and he laughed, surprised.

  She got in the jeep and shut the door.

  “What did he want to talk about?” said her mom from the other side of the back bench.

  “Oh, nothing,” said Emily.

  It was the worst: the worst teenage lie ever, and any mom in her right mind would have called her on it. But her mom was not in her right mind.

  The jeep pulled away.

  Emily closed her eyes, and traveled in time. They were in the little plane, waiting to take off, and Aidan was beside her. He smiled. Squeezed her hand the way he always did; she even felt it.

  She opened her eyes, and he was gone, the future in front of her, untraveled, a road waiting to be driven down.

  They drove.

  CHAPTER 57

  EMILY PICKED UP her homework from her locker and headed out of school. It was a low building, concrete, built for maximum heat insulation in winter.

  “See you at the game?” called Kelly, her hand on her car door.

  Emily smiled. “Yeah,” she said.

  And it was true: she’d be there, supporting—but absolutely not cheerleading. Her suspension was over, and to her surprise, coming back had not been too awful. She’d expected to be ostracized, to be whispered about. Well, there was a bit of that, but it was more excited whispering than cruelty: she was the girl who had survived a plane crash, after all, and then walked down off a mountain. She was pretty sure that was one reason she’d been allowed back—she was famous now, at least briefly, and the school wanted to look forgiving because of the trauma she’d experienced.

  One reason.

  What went unsaid: that everyone assumed she’d stowed away on the plane in order to escape the humiliation, in order to flee from the little town where she was the arson girl.

  She was still the arson girl, of course, the girl who had burned down part of the school; she knew it would take some time to get past that, but even then—it was high school, wasn’t it? There was hardly a kid there who hadn’t dreamed of burning the place down. She was just the one who’d actually done it. Or rather, who had smoked a cigarette in secret, in the boys’ locker room, and then carelessly discarded the butt—that was her story, and she was sticking to it.

  And Miss Brady was going along with it. From the way the teacher looked at her, Emily had a feeling she had a lot of questions: about the cigarette, about what she had been doing in the locker room in the first place. But she didn’t ask them. Emily suspected the man with the gray eyes had something to do with that—that he had exerted pressure of some kind, influence.

  “We’ll keep it off your school record,” Miss Brady had said. “We don’t want to throw away your future because of one mistake.”

  No. No, Emily did not want to throw away her future. Not anymore.

  And later, in return, she’d filmed a special with Miss Brady for the local news crew: the head teacher shaking her hand, welcoming her warmly back to school.

  As if nothing had ever happened.

  So: she’d been hanging out with Kelly, with Madison, with Eric, with Tyrese. It was—and again, she was surprised—kind of fun. It was as if something had changed inside her, since Aidan.

  None of them remembered Aidan, of course.

  She climbed into her old blue Ford F-150–eighty thousand miles on the clock, but her dad had checked it over and reconditioned the engine before he and her mom gave it to her.

  “Thought you could use a little more independence,” her mom had said.

  “And if you lose the keys, you know how to get in,” said her dad.

  There was an awkward silence, and then they laughed. They tried not to talk too much about the time after the plane crash—her parents told themselves a story about it, that they’d been in a rush to get to civilization, but Emily could tell they only partly believed it, and that the best way for them to reconcile the events with the kind of people they understood themselves to be was to not think about it.

  Emily started the engine and turned up the heat. It was nearly summer but still cold when the sun was going down, as it was now.

  There was a knock on the truck window. Emil
y turned, startled.

  Brad winked at her from the other side of the glass. She wound it down. Manually—it took forever, cranking the little handle.

  He winked at her again. “Hey, beautiful,” he said.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “So…,” he said. “I still don’t have a date for prom. Been kinda…reserving the spot for you.”

  Emily laughed, despite herself, at his unflinching self-confidence, his ironclad self-belief.

  “No, thanks,” she said.

  His eyes hardened. “I’ll just have to ask again tomorrow.”

  She took a breath. “Brad,” she said. His small stony eyes. “You know who I am, right? I’m the girl who burned down the locker room because a football player made me mad. I walked away from a plane that crashed and exploded. I did things you would not believe, things the papers have not reported. I came down off a mountain with a man who had sepsis, and lived. A bear attacked us, and we walked away.”

  He bit his lip.

  “So, Brad, dude. Listen. If you ‘ask me on a date’ again, if you approach me again—hell, if you approach any of the girls at this school again—I am going to come for you, OK? And it will be when you least expect it.”

  She gunned the engine, made the tires squeal, and left him standing there, mouth open, as if the Alaskan air might blow right through his head, where his brains should be.

  CHAPTER 58

  SHE DROVE PAST the town’s small strip of stores: hardware, hunting and fishing supplies, groceries. As the houses ran out, she pulled up to the airstrip. She’d heard he was here: that was what some of the whispering at school had been about.

  She drove in and parked in a bay that said: PICK UP AND DROP OFF ONLY in peeling white paint.

  A sleepy-looking guy was on the security desk. He waved her through, and the barrier lifted. She walked across what was laughably referred to as the terminal—a single kiosk, currently closed, where you could buy chewing gum and water—and then outside. There was a mechanic standing around. She asked for directions, and he told her, pointed the way.

  She zipped up her jacket and walked briskly past the single hangar to the plane sitting on the short runway. Beyond, the setting sun lit the hills.

  It was another bush plane. The De Havilland was destroyed, of course, and now he was flying a beautifully restored Super Cub painted in blue and yellow. It had fat tires mounted, so he wasn’t going on a lake run but on a trip to some other airfield elsewhere in the enormous state.

  He had a panel open; was inspecting some element of the engine.

  “Hey,” she said.

  Bob turned, and smiled. “Hey, yourself,” he said. “If you’re planning to stow away, I’m leaving at six a.m. sharp tomorrow.”

  “Ha-ha,” she said. “Just…wanted to say hello. Properly, you know, without my parents there. And the press, and whatever.”

  The media had turned up for her reunion with Bob, when he was helicoptered back to town: the girl and the pilot who had survived the mountains, until he had become too sick to continue, until he had nobly urged her on.

  (She had made Bob the hero in the story. It was the least he deserved.)

  The local newspaper had been there, obviously, but also TV—several channels—and someone from BuzzFeed. They’d done a story on it, complete with photos of bears, and avalanches, and lean-to shelters.

  (But no guns.)

  But it had meant not talking about Aidan. And Aidan was what she wanted to talk about.

  “I was wondering…,” she said.

  He put the wrench he was holding into a steel toolbox, and looked around before meeting her eyes. “…if I remember him,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Relief in her voice, like moonlight in ice. Making it glow.

  He did. He remembered.

  He nodded, even though he’d already answered the question. “Of course I do. Your parents?”

  “No.”

  “That must be weird. I mean, understatement of the century.”

  “It’s…Yeah,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you speak to your wife?” she said.

  “Yep,” he said. “And we’re still speaking.”

  She thought about what Aidan had shown her: how everything that had happened was still there, how nothing was ever lost. She thought about what that might mean, a vision like that, to someone who had lost a son.

  “What Aidan showed you. Did it have to do with time?” she asked. “Like…the present and the past, and how they’re always there?”

  “Yeah. He showed you too?”

  “Yeah. Did you tell your wife?”

  “Did I tell my wife that an alien touched me and I saw that our son will never really die? No.”

  She nodded. That made sense.

  “Explaining it…It’s not quite the same as him showing you—you know?” he said. “Still. It helped. Me and Melanie, we’re going out to dinner next month. Baby steps. But better than not moving at all.”

  “Good,” said Emily. “That’s good. I’m glad.” She was glad: she felt a pang in her heart at the thought of Bob and his wife meeting up again, with their lost son always between them. Though, with what Aidan had shown them—perhaps not so lost as all that. Perhaps as present and as real as anything that had ever happened or was happening or ever would happen.

  That was the gift Aidan had given, to her, and to Bob, and to Bob’s wife, Melanie. The past was always there. The future was waiting to be shaped.

  But, of course, it had been a trial too: the crash and everything after; it had been violent and scary and draining. She took a step back and examined Bob. She noticed, not without a twinge of guilt, that there were new lines on his face; creases around his eyes and a certain hollowness to his cheeks. His left arm was hanging a little oddly.

  “How’s the wound?” she said.

  “Healed now,” he said. “But it aches in the cold.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be: it’s a good luck charm at every airstrip and airport in the state. I crashed and lived to tell the tale. I may never pay for whiskey again. And whiskey helps with the pain.”

  She laughed.

  He looked up, at the mountains and the sky above them. So did she.

  “You think…you think he’s still there? You think he can see us?” she said.

  There was silence for a while.

  “The other day, I was flying west of Juneau,” he said. “Saw a shimmer in the sky beside me, out the port window. Like there was something shiny, just out of sight.”

  Like fish scales behind the air, thought Emily. “Oh,” she said. “Do you think…do you think he…”

  She didn’t need to complete her question.

  Bob lifted his bad arm, and put his hand on her shoulder. “Kid, I think he can always see you. I think he’ll watch over you. That’s what I think.”

  She smiled a little. “Really?” It was a nice thought: that Aidan might miss her too. That he might care.

  “Really. I mean, he can’t come back, right? At least not now. The place is crawling with feds.”

  This was true. Men and women in face masks and bio suits had been all over the woods behind Emily’s house. They’d told her parents they were with the EPA. They hadn’t found anything, though, or at least Emily didn’t think so. They’d have needed heavy equipment, and she didn’t see anything like that. At some point, Aidan and his people must have removed the ship.

  The man with the gray eyes hadn’t been to talk to her yet: but she knew he would. One day.

  “And…,” continued Bob. “His thing is to make himself small, so that you protect him, right? But I figure…I figure he protected us too. So why would he stop?”

  “Huh,” she said.

  Yeah.

  Why wo
uld he stop?

  “What did he say, anyway?” said Bob. “When he…left. Did he say goodbye?”

  She thought for a moment. “No,” she said. “No, he didn’t.”

  Bob smiled. “Well, there you go.”

  CHAPTER 59

  THE SECOND TIME Emily saw the man with the gray eyes, he was in the coffee shop, and she knew he was there to see her.

  When she went inside—immediately taking off her jacket because Mrs. Cartwright always kept the place hot—he was sitting alone at a table near the back.

  She walked over. His restless, analytical eyes followed her all the way.

  “Ms. Perez,” he said.

  “Mr….”

  “Smith will do.”

  “But it’s not your name.”

  “No.”

  She shrugged, and sat down.

  “You want coffee?” he asked.

  “I’ll take mint tea.” She didn’t like mint tea, or at least she didn’t know if she liked it, but she wanted to sound like someone who knew what to order, right away—someone decisive. Powerful.

  He waved over Martina, whom Emily knew from cheerleading and who was in her senior year, and ordered. Martina took one short look at Emily, which might have been because of the fire and the getting suspended, or it might just have been because she was wondering why Emily was in the coffee shop with a much older man.

  Either way: Emily didn’t care.

  “So, we took care of the stolen trucks. The pilot. Everything.” Mr. Smith was watching her as he said this.

  She just looked at him blankly. To thank him, to acknowledge what he was saying, would be to admit that she was not like her parents: to submit to a version of events where she had understood what was happening, where she knew what Aidan was.

  Which, of course, they both knew was the case. But she was being contrary. She wanted to resist, as long as possible.

  “How’s school?” he asked.

  She kept her face neutral. “Was that you too?” she said. “The school letting me come back? The police dropping the charges?”

  He shrugged.