That made sense of it then, how come James could speak English so well but not know words for things they must not have on his planet, like fans and air conditioners. I wished I’d had it when I took that AP Spanish exam.
“I should get rid of it now,” James said. “Since I’ve got the language more or less down. It’s just one more thing that makes it possible to trace me.”
Remembering that crack of light, and the look of terror on James’s face, I said, “Well then for sure. Let’s get rid of it.”
After we finished eating, we walked out to a pier. James let me hold the little red ball in my hand a minute. I wished someone would start speaking French or Chinese so I could see how it worked. It felt like a damn shame to toss such a useful device.
James knelt down and stuck his finger in the water. Then he tasted it. He looked surprised. “Salty,” he said. “Is this an ocean?”
“No. I think it’s one of the Great Lakes.” Honest, I’d never seen the ocean before, and this looked so much like I’d pictured it—sandy shores and everything—I didn’t feel entirely confident in my answer. I wish I’d paid more attention in my geography classes, although I had paid enough attention to know there weren’t supposed to be any oceans in Indiana.
I raised my hand in the air and pitched the little ball of light out into the water. For a second the waves above it turned red, yellow, and orange. Then the light narrowed and petered out altogether. Once I realized it was gone I felt a strong wave of fear. “Are you going to be able to understand me now?” I asked James.
He smiled. “Sure,” he said, and tapped his temple with one finger. “I’m a fast learner. It’s all up here now.”
I let out a good long breath, relieved that I could add “fast learner” and “linguist” to James’s growing list of talents. “You got oceans where you come from?” I said.
“Where I come from, we’ve got practically nothing but ocean. Ninety-five percent of the planet’s surface.”
“You must be good sailors,” I said, and he laughed.
Then he said, “Anna Marie. Back at the hotel. When I grabbed your arm…”
He was still kneeling down on the pier, and he looked up at me, those great big blue eyes, looking like he’d got his feelings hurt again.
“Well the thing is,” I said. “The problem, I mean, is my skin. You can’t touch it, not with your own skin. But it’s OK if you touch me and there’s some kind of barrier. Like our clothing.”
He didn’t ask why, and that made me glad. I wasn’t ready for him to think I was some kind of monster. He just said, “So I can touch you if there’s something between my skin and yours.”
“Yes,” I said. My voice suddenly sounded like a big old toad had hopped into my throat. “You can.”
James stood up. He looked down into my eyes, and I could tell he wasn’t thinking about his home planet, or who was chasing him.
“Good to know,” he said, and I decided one of my favorite things about him was that little bit of devil in his eyes.
James and I got ourselves another hotel room. He fell on his bed, totally spent, almost as soon as we walked through the door. I hadn’t got any more sleep than him, but I still felt jumpy, so I went downstairs. Across the street from the hotel was a gas station, and I went over there and bought myself a phone card. Then I used the pay phone outside the store. It took three rings for someone to pick up.
“Sunshine Bakery,” said a man’s voice. I didn’t know who all it was, but then I never had been permitted to spend much time aboveground.
“Hello,” I said. “May I please speak to Wendy Lee?”
There was a very solemn kind of quiet on the other end. My heart dropped clear on down to my toes, leaving a scared, empty place in between.
“Who’s calling?” He sounded just a tiny bit suspicious.
I reminded myself that there was no way he could recognize my voice. I said the first name that came into my head. “This is Emma Dean Wilford. I spoke to Miss Beauchamp a week or so ago about maybe ordering a cake for my wedding.”
“Well honey,” the man said, suddenly sweet as sugar. “I’m sorry to tell you this. But Miss Beauchamp, she’s had… an accident.”
“Oh dear,” I said, sounding just like prissy Emma Deane. “I do hope she’ll be all right.”
“Only the Lord knows,” the man said. Suddenly I recognized his voice. Not that I’d ever met him. But I heard him with Wendy Lee’s ears. She’d hired him a year ago to work the register and take cake orders. He had a wife and three children at home, but that didn’t stop him and Wendy Lee from closing the door behind them in the dry pantry downstairs. I shut my eyes against the image of his great big bare belly and tried to concentrate on how Wendy Lee was doing now.
The man went on talking. “She’s been in the hospital for days,” he said. My heart traveled back to my stomach and started in fluttering. I thought he should sound a whole lot more cut up about it, considering what all the two of them had done together.
“What’s wrong with her?” I blurted out. I wanted to say, Is she in a coma? But that didn’t seem like a question a normal wedding cake customer would ask. Probably bad enough to ask what was wrong.
“She was attacked,” said the man. “By a disgruntled former employee.”
“Why, that’s terrible,” I said. And then I said again, “I do hope she’ll be all right,” hoping he would translate this to Tell me what’s wrong with her.
This man, Curtis was his name—I could hear Wendy Lee’s voice giggling and simpering, Oh, Curtis—Curtis didn’t need James’s little red ball to read between the lines. He said, “The doctors can’t say yet if she’ll wake up. They can’t say she won’t though, so we’re putting our faith in small miracles.”
I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep a wink, but when I crawled under the sheets back at the hotel it came over me like someone pulling me underneath the water. It was only about mid-afternoon, and the last thing I saw was orangey daylight behind the thick gold hotel curtains.
Hours later, when I woke up screaming, the room was completely dark. I’d been having the dream. The same old dream I’d had what seemed like a million times before. Except this time it wasn’t Cody in the dream but James.
The two of us had been out sailing on a wide, rumbling body of water. “I could swear this is the ocean,” James said, and I told him no, it was just a saltwater lake. In my dream I remembered what I’d learned in school, that it was Lake Michigan, and that some of the smaller parts were salt water, just like the sea.
James smiled at me like I was the brightest creature on any planet, mine or his. He smiled at me like I was wise and beautiful and very desirable. I smiled back, hoping my smile communicated the same things his did. He reached out to touch my face. I knew I ought to stop him. But I wanted it so bad, to feel the palm of his hand against my cheek.
His hand came toward me, cupped lovingly. I knew I couldn’t let it happen. At the top of my lungs I screamed “NO!”—in my dreams and I guess also in the hotel room. When I opened my eyes, someone from the other side of the wall was knocking their complaints. But I couldn’t stop screaming, even though I knew it had only been a dream.
My eyes had started to adjust to the dark. And I saw James, sweeping from his bed over to mine. I could feel my hair, spilling down over my bare shoulders.
“No!” I screamed again, this time in real life, for real reasons.
But James had come prepared. He had the hotel blanket in his hands, and he spread it out over me. It covered my hair and my shoulders, and protected his hands as he wound it tight around me, and rocked me close, and even kissed the top of my head through the itchy fake wool.
I could feel his chin on top of my head. His arms around me were every bit as strong as I’d imagined they’d be. James leaned back against the headboard, and I leaned against his chest, still with his arms around me.
“James,” I finally said, after a long time. “The name James. That’s an American
name. A Planet Earth name. It can’t be your real one.”
“No,” he said. I could feel his lips moving against the blanket over my head.
“Well,” I said. “What’s your real name then?”
“You wouldn’t be able to say it. Our speech is very different from yours.”
I didn’t want to argue with him, but I really wanted to hear his name—his real name. I wanted to know him, in a way I’d never known anyone else in the world. After a couple minutes of silence he must have been able to tell how much I wanted to know because he gave in, and made a noise that sounded a little like a song and a little like a very low whistle.
“That’s beautiful,” I said, and I meant it. The sound made my heart hurt a little, with its prettiness and also because I knew I’d never get close to imitating it. “Does it mean something?”
“It does,” he said. “But you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
“It means touch,” he said.
I sat up and turned my head to look him straight in the eye. “Touch?”
“Touch.”
“No shit?”
He looked at me, perplexed, then smiled. Sure enough he’d got past needing his translator. “No shit,” he agreed.
I flopped back down on his chest, the blanket firmly around me. I couldn’t let myself fall asleep this way—it would be too dangerous. At the same time I couldn’t give him up just yet.
Touch. Fighting hard to keep my eyes open so I could make this last just a little bit longer, I knew I never would call him anything else again. It didn’t take long for him to fall back asleep, and worried I would do the same, I tore myself away and crawled into the bed where he’d been sleeping. I pressed my face hard as I could into the pillow, breathing in his fragrance like it was oxygen, and feeling the warmth he’d left behind like it was luxury.
We drove out of La Porte in dusky morning light, hardly any other cars on the road. Touch took the wheel. As he pulled onto 80 West, the glove box flew open and the owner’s manual fell out, along with an envelope of photographs from CVS. I leafed through them, all these pictures of some kind of office party. There were a lot of photos of one person in particular, this smiley brunette woman who looked about thirty. I figured it was her car, but when I looked at the little registration card it said “Franklin Faxon.” That seemed like a funny name to me. Franklin Faxon must have a crush on this girl in all the photos. She could’ve been his girlfriend, but something about how she smiled at the camera, looking flattered but not totally comfortable, made me think she wasn’t and never would be. Now on top of that he’d got his car stolen. How must he have felt when he came on out of the hotel and found it gone? Even if we did steal it as a matter of life or death, I felt awful sad for Franklin Faxon, and guilty, too. The car was so clean and neat. Everything about it screamed Man on a Budget.
Touch and I talked about it for a bit. According to the registration, Franklin lived in Napoleon, Ohio. Maybe he’d been in Altoona on business, or on the way from visiting someone. We decided we’d backtrack to Ohio and leave the car someplace in town, then send him a little postcard telling him where to find it. Then we’d get another car, which we’d also have to steal, but we’d take this car from a dealership.
“But that’s stealing, too,” Touch said.
“Yeah, but it’s stealing from a corporation,” I said. “We won’t steal from a little lot, we’ll go straight to a big dealer.” I filled Touch in, on how bad corporations were on account of only wanting to make money and not caring about the people who worked for them, or the people who bought things from them. He nodded like he could take this idea personally. “Is there anything like that where you come from?” I asked. Despite my quick acceptance of the general concept, I couldn’t quite bring myself to say on your planet.
“If you’d asked me that a few weeks ago, I would have said no,” he told me. “But right now…” He let his voice trail off, like for some reason the answer had changed to yes.
It was still amazing to me, after all the years of my life wanting to travel and see sights, how fast they were all passing me by in a blur of pavement and green grass. We got to Napoleon in the late afternoon and left Franklin Faxon’s car in the parking lot of a Super Walmart store. Then we walked down along the busy main thoroughfare till we found a hotel to check into. Neither of us was hungry, but we both felt kind of restless, so we went for a walk beside this wide, pretty river. So far every town we’d stopped in had something neat—like this river, or that great big lake in La Porte—but nothing I’d seen had blown me away, or been different enough from what else I’d seen my whole life.
Oddly, Touch seemed to be thinking the same thing. He stared out over the water and said, “This is just like the rivers where I come from. I mean the landscape is different. It’s colder, and there are a lot of trees I don’t recognize.”
He turned toward me, like he meant to say something else, then got distracted. He smiled, and looked me up and down, head to foot and then back again. I liked that feeling, that just the sight of me could derail him, get him off whatever subject he had on his mind. So I let myself smile back, trying not to think on how looking at me was about all he’d ever have.
Touch and I kept walking along the river. He told me how where he came from, it wasn’t unusual at all to visit other planets. In fact one of the things Touch did there was build ships for interplanetary travel, and devices like the little red ball that translated for him.
“So, you’re like an inventor,” I said.
“Yes. I make things that let people travel places they wouldn’t ordinarily be able to go. The device that brought me here…” He trailed off and looked around us, almost like he was worried someone would hear. “Let’s just say I miscalculated.”
Touch was almost out of cash, and he didn’t want to use the ATM at the hotel lobby, so we stopped at a gas station. You can bet the clerk kept a close eye on us, two freaky leather-wearing strangers. Good thing the two of us standing there blocked Touch’s method of retrieving cash. He reached into his pocket and took out another tiny little ball. This one was blue. He held it out in his palm, then released it just in front of the slot where your card was supposed to go. The ball hovered for a moment and then whooshed on into the slot. The screen lit up, but didn’t ask for any pin number or amount or anything. It just started spitting out twenties, one after another, a little pile of them getting fatter and fatter till I didn’t think the tray could hold them.
“Touch,” I said, elbowing him. “I think that’s enough.”
He tapped the card slot and the little blue ball flew back to him. He put it in his pocket along with his bills. On the way out we bought a Coke for me and hot tea for him, then started to walk back to the hotel.
“What about the food?” I said. “Do you eat the same sort of thing where you come from?”
“Pretty much the same,” he said. “We’ve got the same kind of animal life, so the meat’s the same, and the fruits and vegetables, too. Your preparation is more primitive. I can taste chemicals. But what about you? Now you know why I’m cold all the time. Are you going to tell me why I can’t touch you?”
I put my hands in the pockets of my jacket. Although Touch had a big secret, there was no denying it, it seemed like it fell into a different category than mine. For example, he came from a whole world of people just like himself. Whereas I was the only freak like me anywhere in the galaxy. What’s more, Touch might present a kind of danger in the form of that crackling light that had filled up our room. But the danger I presented came directly from me.
“I got a skin condition,” I told him. The words sounded pretty hollow coming out of my mouth. By now we’d come back to the business section of town, all cement and stores and cars whizzing by. “If you touched me, you could catch it.”
Touch cleared his throat. “I don’t want to contradict you,” he said. “But at this point I’ve seen a good deal of your skin, and the only cond
ition it appears to have is extreme touchability. So you might have to provide a more convincing reason. If you really want me to keep my hands off you.”
I stopped walking, and so did he. He smiled down at me. And because I wanted to make my point, make it clear, I closed my double-gloved hand around his arm, which was also covered in several layers of clothing.
“Listen,” I said. “For now could you please just take my word for it?”
He stood there blinking at me, and I looked back at him with eyes that didn’t even belong to me, not rightfully. But he nodded, as if he believed I were someone to trust, which made me feel a little sad. Then I noticed the store we were standing in front of. REI. Cody used to stock up on supplies there for hunting trips with his daddy.
“Hey,” I said. “Let’s go in here and put some of that money of yours to practical use.”
At the hotel room we unloaded everything we’d bought for Touch at REI—different kinds of long underwear, a fleece vest, a down vest, and a down parka. Cold as he was, he hadn’t quite got to a point where he needed the last, but it seemed smart to be prepared. No telling how long we’d be on the road or how far we’d end up traveling. I also bought myself a wool cap and a balaclava, which was a kind of wool hat that covered my whole head and face except my eyes. It might come in handy down the road.
“It’s funny,” I said to Touch. We sat on the hotel bed, on either side of the big shopping bag, sorting through the new loot so he could put his silk long underwear right on. “My whole family’s from the south, but I always hated the heat. I always wanted to go somewhere cold, even see snow.”
“Snow?”
I had to laugh. “I’ve never seen it either,” I said. “Up north, where it’s cold, in the winter, rain turns to snow. This white fluffy stuff.” I showed him the tag on his down jacket, which had a picture of snow-topped mountains. Touch shivered just looking at it.
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