Last call. All aboard.
So be it.
Turning his back on the boat, the sea, and all his possible futures, Joel ducked around the side of the terminal. When the woman in the rain shell and the praying mantis girl finally left, slipping from shadow to shadow to keep away from the light, he went inside again and stored his suitcase in one of the lockers.
“Be right back,” he heard himself tell it, in the voice of someone abandoning a child.
Then, as casually and inconspicuously as he could, he edged out the door, off the road, away from town, and into the woods.
13
Her moment came, as Emilia had known it would, and sooner than she could have hoped.
In his excitement, the Invisible Man had declined her suggestion that they make the trip in segments, over a period of days. He also denied her the fifteen minutes it would have taken to search up a well-timed red-eye that might have gotten them across the country under cover of darkness, protecting his skin and her increasingly light-sensitive eyes. He wanted the first thing in the air.
And so, less than twelve hours after Emilia had sniffed out the trail of his precious Aunt Sally for him, their flight jostled through a states-wide thunderhead that stretched across the empty, rolling plains below like furniture covering in an abandoned house and touched down in Laramie just after dawn. They still might have made it to the terminal before sunrise, but for some unimaginable reason—their plane seemingly the only machine awake, their wing lights the only illumination on the ground that didn’t emanate from the spreading pink overhead—they idled almost an hour on the tarmac while the Invisible Man fidgeted in his seat like a five-year-old and Emilia soothed and shushed him the way a mother might, or a sister. Or lover.
That was his first flight, after all, she thought. All those things he claimed to have done and seen done, but he’d never before left the earth and returned to it.
Unless you counted dying, however and whenever he’d done that, if he actually had. Did that count?
Thoughts like those didn’t even jolt her, anymore. But the next one did:
My first flight, too.
A long time ago, late in the evenings when her mother finally coaxed her father into turning down his record player, he’d come and sit on the edge of her bed in her tiny room and tell her how, one day, he’d whisk her off into the night sky and take her to his childhood haunts in Bogotá. Together, they’d hunt old forty-fives and seventy-eights in the market stalls on hot, buggy weekends, nosh dulce de leche obleas, and dodge the jugglers and acrobats. Somehow, her notions of flying had conflated with imaginary Colombian wanderings with her father. Until tonight, whenever she’d imagined air travel, she’d envisioned more singing.
Right before their plane finally moved toward a gate, Emilia began to worry. Every time she stopped murmuring, the Invisible Man resumed squirming in his seat. She had kept their shade drawn, but everyone else seemed to have opened theirs, and now sunlight poured through the cabin and down the aisles as though hunting. The cowboy in the Nordstrom tie across the aisle had stopped bothering to keep his glances sidelong; he stared openly as the Invisible Man twirled a frayed edge of bandage at the bottom of his neck like a little girl with a hair curl. Way back in his throat, he’d started to grunt.
He’s going to lose it, Emilia knew. If we don’t get inside soon. Why that thought made her feel guilty, she had no idea. None of this was her fault.
Except maybe not standing up right now, and screaming a warning. Getting the exit-row passengers to pop the door, trigger the slide, jump, run.
To calm herself as much as her companion, Emilia forced herself to lean in closer, murmur faster. She didn’t even know what she was saying. All the while, she fingered the holes in her arm, playing the notes. D E A C. D E A C. She’d done this so often now that she’d started recalling whole songs from fourth-grade music class, which was the only one she’d had before her school district cut arts instruction for good. At the end of the year—in her honor, Emilia was convinced, possibly even after a complaint from her father, though he’d never mentioned doing that—they’d learned “La Cucaracha.” So she played that, now, on her open veins. On the air whistling over and into them.
Finally, inevitably, the Invisible Man popped open his seat belt, started to stand. Emilia grabbed hold, pulled hard, and was surprised when he yielded, folding back on himself and dropping his head onto her shoulder. He whimpered like a puppy appealing to its master.
Only then did it occur to her that she might be exactly that: his master. At least, she might become that, one day. He clearly wanted, even needed one. So she grabbed him by the hair as hard as her fingers could grab, which wasn’t very hard, in her weakened state. Hard enough to surprise him, though, and the surprise kept him quiet just a little longer. Holding tight, she serenaded him, singing along to the notes she alone could hear emanating from her arm.
“Shall I tell you a story, for once?” she said, when she’d finished the song.
He didn’t answer, but he went more still. The plane, mercifully, started to move toward the terminal. She told him about her name. About her father’s lifelong Faulkner fixation, which only intensified after he finally got the glamorous opportunity to be the first-ever South American–born hire—as an adjunct, teaching half Introductory Literature Survey and half in the adult education extension—at Delta South-Jackson University. He’d demanded that his only daughter be called Emily, in homage to the Great Mississippian, and to bind her to his adopted homeland of magnolia trees and soft-spoken julep sippers who mopped sweat from their brows and swayed to the sweet breezes and didn’t seem to hate him.
It had taken most of the pregnancy, as Emilia’s mother told it, to convince him that using that name might be bad luck. She even got him to scour the entire Faulknerian oeuvre for a more suitable choice. And when the twenty-six hours of labor had ended, and their baby lay quiet and squinch-eyed and squirming on Emilia’s mother’s breast, her father had grinned down at both of them, softly weeping, and said, “The problem is, they’re all bad luck.”
So her mother had suggested Emilia.
The whole time she’d been telling the Invisible Man this story, Emilia had slowly lowered her head, feeling her companion—captor—go still against her. She was all but kissing his ear when he suddenly straightened, gazing at her out of the holes in his bandages, over the ridges of his charred and ruined skin.
“It’s a very musical name,” he said in a slow-honey drawl her father would have loved. No: recognized. Because this drawl was learned, just like her father’s. Another imitation, an even more skillful one. Whoever the Invisible Man had once been, he wasn’t Mississippi gentry, either.
At any other time, Emilia’s eyes might have filled with tears. She half expected them to, anyway. But she had no tears in her, just a permanent, floating fug that had cleared for one sweet second.
She made herself gaze straight back at the Invisible Man, and sure enough, she could see him in there. She was there, too, floating in his irises like a little bluegill behind aquarium glass. Slowly, sadly, from far away, she felt herself smile. “My mother was a fish,” she said.
To get him off the plane, past the wide-open windows, she had to drape him in his coat and her coat, then borrow a blanket for his head. They waited until even the old couple a few rows ahead were wheeled off by the ground crew. Then, huddled together, they hurried up the jetway. They were a few feet from the building when a gust of wind battered the walls as though trying to get at them. The Invisible Man jerked his head up, catching a pinprick of light on one exposed ridge of cheek before gasping and ducking. As though from inside the terminal, Emilia heard herself laugh. As she did, her arm tightened around his long, bony shoulders.
At the car rental counter, while her companion lurked on the far side of the baggage carousel, Emilia procured their transport using the driver’s licenses he’d procured or had forged somewhere and a credit card he gave her but that she suspected w
asn’t his. The license with the picture that looked a little like hers bore the name Debra Billingson. Emilia wondered—without any emotional response she could detect in herself—if that was a real person. Or had been. She kept expecting the terse, college-aged African-American woman behind the counter to pause as she stared into some alert on her computer screen with her startling blue eyes.
Was it possible that someone back in Butterfly Weed, in her old life, had found the trail Emilia had left? Recognized it for what it was?
Oddly, Emilia still felt little beyond curiosity. She also didn’t seem to be opening her own mouth, leaning in to beg for help or to warn.
Still too risky. Still not the moment.
Instead, she waited, stealing glances at the rental agent’s eyes. That astonishing color. As though all the sky outside the glass sliding doors had swept in and filled her. Maybe what had happened in the Butterfly Weed library—what the Invisible Man had done to her there—wasn’t so rare as she’d imagined. Maybe it happened all the time, to everyone. Sooner or later, the world you lived in permeated your skin like light, like air, not so much changing or claiming as reminding you:
You belong to me. You are made of me …
“Anything else?” said the rental agent, snapping off words as though popping a gum bubble. She handed Emilia keys and a map shaped like a paper place mat with horseshoes and saddles decorating the edges. Already, those eyes were moving to the customer behind Emilia. The Nordstrom cowboy.
Emilia almost blurted out everything right then. The whisper rose in her throat. Help me. Get help. But she turned away before the words could escape.
Why?
Because if she said those words, the woman with the eyes was going to die. Emilia couldn’t have explained how she knew this. She had never actually seen the Invisible Man do anything, except to Emilia herself.
But she did know. So she waited. Made herself bide her time.
Barely five minutes later, her moment arrived.
The car, of course, was out there, in a lot a good two hundred yards away, across a wind-whipped, shimmering lake of weak October sun that, to her companion, might as well have been a lava flow. Once he’d circled the baggage claim and rejoined her, she offered him the keys. He took them, then immediately offered them back. As she’d known he would.
“Could you get it?” he said, sounding like an infirm grandfather, not so much afraid or weak as overwhelmed. He stared through the glass, no doubt picturing the winking chimera of a woman—creature—he had dreamed, for years, of finding again. His world had come for him, too, after all. Savagely. And more than once, Emilia realized, with a spasm of something very like … though of course it wasn’t …
He pushed the keys into her palm. Her fingers barely trembled in the taking, the trembling as much from weakness as any effort to disguise her intentions or keep herself from grabbing and running. At the threshold, just as the doors whisked open, Emilia hesitated for a single moment. Until then, she’d somehow kept from glancing back to check whether he was following, but now she let herself look.
Had he intuited her thoughts? Did he know? He was just standing there, watching his … companion? Blood cow? Valet? What was she, now, exactly?… melt into all that terrifying daylight.
He’d made his choice. He would take his chances.
Out she stepped. She almost hesitated again as she passed from under the overhang above the taxi queue into the sun, half believing the light would hurt her, too. But it didn’t. It just poured onto her face, not warm, so much drier than any sun she had previously known, and yet so alive. Her steps accelerated.
Keep going, she thought, and went on thinking it. Get in the car. Don’t hurry. There was no need to hurry. She’d simply climb in, head straight to the back of the lot and onto that open, empty access road. Then she’d disappear into the plains or up the mountains. He would never find her.
He wouldn’t even bother looking. She wasn’t what he’d chased, or would, ever.
She shuddered as she clicked the key button, watched the little green Cougar blink awake and chirp almost like an actual cat. Like a living thing, welcoming her back to her real life.
Go, she was thinking. Drive!
But even before she’d settled behind the wheel, other thoughts blew through her.
He was her responsibility. She couldn’t just leave him in this airport, huddled and hooded and scared. Unsupervised and close to panic. She would not be able to live with the consequences.
Also—though she didn’t want to examine this thought at all—she didn’t appear to want to.
Backing the Cougar out of its space, she turned toward the exit to the lot, which turned out to be on the terminal side. That postponed her decision a few more seconds. The Invisible Man had emerged through the sliding doors and was standing by the empty taxi queue, in the dip in the pavement down which people wheeled rolling bags, right at the edge of the shadow provided by the overhang.
Her Invisible Man, small and scared and hopeful amid all these Stetsons. All this sky.
In spite of that thought, or maybe because of it, and with a bang in her heart as though someone had set off a firecracker under her ribs, she pushed her foot down on the accelerator. Go! she was still screaming inside her head. Her tires squealed, and the Invisible Man looked up, right at her. He knew. She was sure of it, realized that she was accelerating rather than stopping, understood that she was going to blow right past him. His eyes grabbed hers as she approached, still accelerating. Unless—wait—were her eyes grabbing his? She watched him twitch in his bandages, felt him know.
Then he made his own decision and stepped off the curb into the road.
Go-o-o, Emilia’s mind shrieked and went on shrieking even as her foot leapt to the brake and slammed down. The Cougar bucked beneath her like a rodeo horse as it skidded to a stop.
Through the windshield, she watched the Invisible Man stare at her. At her, in spite of the sun on his skin, which had to be sizzling even through his coat and her coat and the airplane blanket and his bandages. He was staring at her, and never mind his precious Aunt Sally, hovering forever over his life like God. A god that had abandoned him.
He’d stepped out to her. Right into her path.
To make it easier for her to run him down? As a challenge?
Or in a sign of trust?
He trusted her, she realized, astonished. Partly, she was sure, because he had no choice. He would not be able to get where he needed without her. But at this second, this pathetic, monstrous creature needed her more than any living thing had needed her, ever. She had, at last, made herself indispensible to someone.
Some part of her, way down in the depths of her brain, kept screaming, but she was no longer listening. She watched the Invisible Man move for the passenger door. Watched her fingers pop the lock to let him in. When he’d settled in his seat, hidden as much of himself as he could under the coats and blanket, he peered at her sidelong out of the cave of hoods he’d made. Emilia felt tears on her cheeks again. She couldn’t have expressed—and didn’t want to examine—why she was crying, or for whom. But every time she did it, she found the fact that she still could a sort of comfort.
Once they’d reached Laramie, they made stops at three motels, two coffee shops, and a library to leaf through the last week’s local papers. Within an hour, they had the confirmation they’d come for. The trail was obvious, in the end. The traces unmistakable if you knew what you were looking for, and accepted that it was real.
“They won’t still be here,” the Invisible Man announced, once they’d pieced together all the bits of fact and anecdote they’d collected: the redheaded fairy girl no one had seen before, who’d sung one song at the little folkie joint downtown and then vanished; the two mutilated corpses found fifteen miles apart within a week of each other, one in a motel room no one could remember renting to anybody, the other washed up against a fence way out on the plains. That one was mostly bone, like something buffalo hunters migh
t have left if there still were such things as buffalo hunters, and if they hunted things other than buffalo.
Before leaving the library, they used a computer terminal to comb the police blotter for stolen-car reports, then checked the Greyhound and Amtrak stations. Finally, safe under cover of darkness once more, they returned to the airport, where the Invisible Man showed the one photograph he carried of his precious Sally to every desk agent he could find.
By midnight, he and Emilia were on a flight to Bellingham.
14
The first text of the day dinged Trudi awake at quarter to seven. Blinking in the Sunday-morning dark, she rolled over, cleared sock puppets off her pillow, and pulled her phone from underneath.
The texter was Eliana, naturally, back already from her first-thing-everyday swim practice, having apparently just read Trudi’s final barrage of messages from the night before, chronicling the latest round of Stockade insanity: Eddie hiding in the woods somewhere; Jess and Joel and Benny scurrying in and out of the compound shouting instructions to each other, none of which were hey, he’s done this before, why don’t we just hang out and wait for him. At one point, Benny had even put out a plate of mushroom-eggs and ketchup, Eddie’s favorite, on the picnic table, as if the kid were a cat.
Much later, around ten thirty, Jess had remembered Trudi and called up, “Hey, keep your eyes open, huh? Keep watch? Call me the second he comes back. I’ll be…” Then she’d gestured at the trees, as though that were some sort of destination or plan.
To her own surprise, Trudi had tugged the window open to answer, mostly because Jess always managed to look so goddamn small. It was a knack she had. “He’ll come back. He always comes back.”
“I know,” Jess had answered, in that voice of hers that actually said, I almost know.
That seemed fair enough, given Jess’s life. And so, despite her being sure—nearly sure—that Eddie really would be back, Trudi had done as asked. Instead of going to bed, she’d sat at her window, talking to her hands. Sometimes, she put her puppets down and used her thumbs and her phone—the portal through which she communicated with the mainland, that magical other dimension where people lived with parents and didn’t get devoured in woods—to talk to her friends. She watched the yard and the back of the main house while everyone else swept into and out of the trees. Around one thirty A.M., jerking out of a cliff-dive in her chair, it occurred to her that tonight’s Jess-overreaction might not be so overreacty. That’s when she’d unleashed her final volley of texts about her “family,” which wasn’t the way she thought of the people she lived with, just the closest she could come with any words she knew. Family was closer than keepers. By a little, anyway.
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