Dreams of Distant Shores

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  So it wasn’t alcohol, and we didn’t think it was depression, either, that made her quietly, stubbornly, refuse to leave her house for this summer’s reunion.

  “What if they come back?” she asked us, as, individually, we pleaded, cajoled, argued that it was not possible to have a family reunion without her.

  So we all crowded in with Uncle Beau’s family, who lived out of town on several acres, in a rambling old farmhouse. They had the biggest driveway for the RVs, the widest lawns for the children’s tents, and were only a few miles from Beau’s mother’s place.

  “What the heck does she mean by that?” Beau was the first to demand. “You’d think she wants them back. That’s not how it happens in the movies.”

  His and his wife Greer’s children were my age, twenty-something; so were Uncle Sam and Aunt Sabrina’s two. Miranda and I had grown up running barefoot through hot, dusty forests in late August with our cousins, then leaping into lake water to clean ourselves off. In later years, we lay outside our tents at midnight, watching shifting stars and planets, roaming satellites and the occasional distant airplane, in a sky so vast and black, it could roll over us and pull us into itself like a tide. I could feel the earth moving under me on those nights, a little whirling ball working its way around the sun, which was busy finding its own path around the galaxy in great, slow, astonishing measures of time that gave no more thought to my tiny life than I gave to the ant I slapped off my ankle. On those nights I could imagine that flying saucer with blue lights like a scallop’s fringe of eyes around its shell, or that humungous birthday cake lit like a Vegas casino descending out of the stars, drawing us all up into its lights, and just maybe, before it sent us all back to our mundane lives, giving us an altered point ofview, a glimpse out of alien eyes, of what all this dark, this fire, this unimaginable infinity meant. I was a minute flicker of fire aware of its existence, aware that it could be blown out at any second. What was the meaning of everything?

  Then I did those other things: fell in love, went to college, went to work, fell in love again, got married, had two boys. I learned to live without answers. After a while, I forgot the questions.

  “Drugs,” Uncle Beau repeated blankly, after Wallace had mopped

  himself off and Gage had put out the brush fires in the living room. Beau cocked an eyebrow at his sister. Women kept track of everyone’s ailments and who was taking what for them. Aunt Sabrina only looked questioningly at me. I had bought Grandma Abby her first cell phone, taught her how to use it. She became an avid fan, calling and texting at whim. But she hadn’t told me that.

  I shrugged. “She hasn’t mentioned anything new lately. My mother might know.”

  But my parents were still on the road, having stopped for a visit to the more sedate reunion of my father’s family, which involved restaurants and hotels instead of burned hot dogs under a pine tree. Also among the missing were Sabrina’s two children, my cousins Alys and Sydney. Sydney and her husband, Lyle, were still on the road with their two little girls, Meade and Dulcie, who loved my impossible toddlers and even had a soothing effect on Reed and Holly’s turbulent boys, Luke, Han, and Indiana. What, we all wondered, had they expected, with those names? Choirboys? Reed and Holly had dropped them off at Uncle Beau’s earlier and fled to a wedding a couple hundred miles away. They’d be back soon as possible, they’d assured us. Aunt Greer was running a betting pool on that promise. My cousin Alys had just started a new job and couldn’t get away. Beau and Greer’s son Marshall had gone off to do good in some impoverished country rather than face the wild horde of his own family, and was out of the loop re: alien spaceships.

  I made a sudden decision then, and stood up, this time without spilling beers and boyfriends.

  “I’ll call her and ask.”

  I went outside onto the wide wraparound porch for a quiet place to talk. The moon was a spill of light and a silvery rim pushing up behind a dark peak. I looked for ships in the inky sky while my grandmother’s cell sounded. I had a sudden vision of her phone calling an empty house, her favorite chair still rocking, something—the umbrella stand—knocked over, the front door wide open. I was actually startled when she said my name.

  “Maggie! Where are you, sweetheart? And why are you there and not over here with me?”

  “I’m at Uncle Beau’s with everybody. Shall I come over and get you?”

  She didn’t answer immediately; I waited.

  “Oh,” she said slowly, “I don’t think so.”

  “But the little ones—they’d love to see you.”

  “Maybe tomorrow. During the day. I’ll drive over then.”

  “Promise?”

  “I do, dear.”

  “If I don’t see you, I’ll come and get you.”

  “Oh,” she said again, a definite sigh this time. “I do get tired of all the questions. Nobody really wants to hear my answers. Their eyes glaze over; they turn everything I say into some one-word explanation. Boredom. Or gin.”

  I swallowed a laugh, feeling guilty at the same time. “Well, nobody’s suggested boredom yet. But they did wonder if Dr. Gresham prescribed any new drugs.”

  “Drugs? Not since Scott died. And I stopped taking those ages ago. Why?”

  “Miranda’s new boyfriend says his mother takes a prescription drug that makes her hallucinate elephants.”

  “No—really?”

  “And a white buffalo.”

  “What’s she on, dear? I might like some of that.”

  I let her hear my laugh this time. “I’ll ask him.”

  “And how is this new boyfriend? Do we approve?”

  I made a face only the moon saw. “He’s okay. Lots of muscle, cute face, pretty pleased with himself. Maybe I’m just too protective. No one will ever be good enough for my sister.”

  “And how are you, Maggie? You and Gage.”

  I smiled again. We talked a while. I told her funny stories about the boys; she reminisced about my grandfather. Then she said, out of the blue, as we were drawing the conversation to a close, “Do you know that their mating rituals are entirely different?”

  My fingers tightened on my cellphone; it beeped. I pushed it against my ear as though that would help me understand her. “Who? Buffalo, you mean?”

  “No, they’re nothing like the buffalo,” she answered patiently. “Nothing at all. More like—well—salmon, if anything on earth. I have to go, sweets. I’m supposed to turn on my TV now. I’ll come and see you all tomorrow.”

  “Gran. I’m coming over now.”

  But she had ended the call before she heard me. I went back inside and Bertram grabbed me, pushing his face against my knees and wailing. Fargo barreled into both of us, got an arm-lock on my thighs, trying to outwail Bertram. I could smell Bertram’s diaper. Through the kitchen doorway I saw Gage pop an almond into his mouth, chase it with an upended beer.

  In that moment, the spaceship flitted into my mind, layered like a wedding cake, ringed with lights, engines humming in lovely harmony, vast portals sliding slowly open to draw me up and away, far, far away, to the place where nobody knew where I was, and I would never know what was going to happen next.

  Aunt Greer and I wrestled my two into bed; Aunt Sabrina came to read them a story while Greer and I got Holly’s boys into their sleeping bags in the pup tent on the lawn. We left them with their ray guns for protection and enough cheesy snackie thingies to dye their teeth orange by morning.

  By that time my grandmother’s space alien had dwindled in memory; all I wanted was an ice-cold beer.

  Uncle Beau glanced up vaguely as we came back into the kitchen; he had forgotten we had gone. Then he heard the quiet. His face brightened and he sighed expansively. “Ah. Peace.” His wife and his sister glared at him; he didn’t notice that either. He went back to frowning, cracking a peanut between his thumbs. “Thing is, if it is dementia, we’ve got decisions to make.” He looked across the table at me as I slid into my chair next to Gage. “Did you get hold of her? Or was s
he off gallivanting in the stars?”

  “I talked to her.” I paused to drink, and bits of our conversation came back. “She said she wasn’t taking any new meds. She seemed—well, like herself. Clearheaded and cheerful.” Then I remembered more. “At least—”

  “At least what?” Miranda prodded.

  “Well.” I rubbed my eyes with beer-cold fingers. “We talked about the kids and about Grandpa; she said she’ll drive herself over here tomorrow. Then she made some weird comment about alien mating rituals. How they were sort of like salmon. Then she said she had to go turn on the TV and she hung up.” In the sudden silence, I added reluctantly, “It sounded as though turning on the TV had something to do with the aliens.”

  “Wow,” Miranda said softly.

  Uncle Beau’s jaw set; he consulted Aunt Sabrina with his eyes. Wallace remained tactfully silent, letting his expression tell us that he could have told us so.

  Gage had a funny look on his face, as though he were chewing on something bizarre in his mind.

  “Salmon,” he said. “They find their way back to the place where they were born to spawn. Is that what she meant by alien mating rituals?”

  “Wasn’t that a Star Quest episode?” Uncle Beau muttered.

  “They come back here?” Miranda said, straightening suddenly. “To earth?”

  “Well, this is where she saw them.”

  “Then they’d be—”

  “Our older smarter ancestors,” I finished. “Yeah.”

  “Very much older,” Gage said. “Like before dinosaurs.”

  “And so much smarter they figured out how to fly way back then.”

  “But wait,” Wallace said, catching up. “What if the aliens were just passing through on their way to someplace else and—”

  “And got stopped cold by mom’s stunning beauty and obvious ability to procreate,” Aunt Sabrina said wryly. “Sure.”

  “Well, maybe they’re just scientists taking a look—”

  Uncle Beau dropped his hand flat on the table, causing bottles to tremble. “You’re all talking like it might have happened,” he complained. “The point is she invented it. It’s a dream. Her imagination. That’s what we’ve got to deal with. Aliens in her brain, not in the sky. There’s got to be a pill for that.” He cracked another peanut, emptied the shell into his mouth. His eyes went to his sister again, questioning. “When she comes over tomorrow, we’ll make an appointment for her with Dr. Gammon. Okay?”

  Aunt Sabrina shrugged, picked up her beer. “Can’t do any harm,” she said wearily. “But let’s not make her feel bad. Let’s try to get her to stay here with us. She can turn on the TV for them here if she has to. They can land on your lawn.”

  “Sure,” Uncle Beau said. “We’ll feed them hot dogs.”

  A young face peered around the doorway behind him; not one of mine, I saw with relief.

  “Mom?” It was Indiana, with his ray gun in one hand. “I mean, Grandma?”

  “What do you need, Hon?” Aunt Greer asked.

  “There was something funny in the sky. I think I shot it.”

  Nobody breathed. Then we all moved at once, scrambling over toys, books, each other for the screen door, left unlatched for the campers. We spilled out onto the porch, all of us assuming the same position: gripping the porch railing, heads tilted, staring up at the starry sky, hunting for whatever moved.

  Then Gage spoke. “Wait.”

  “It’s plastic,” Uncle Beau said heavily. “It’s a toy. We gave them to the boys for—” He turned his head toward Aunt Greer. “Last Christmas? Wasn’t it?”

  She nodded, her hands loosening on the railing. “Runs on double D batteries. Like a flashlight. And just about as dangerous.”

  Wallace gave a dry little chuckle. But I had seen his face, as stunned and thoughtless as any of us before we hit the porch.

  “She’s got us all going,” Gage breathed.

  Indiana gestured vaguely at the moon with his ray gun. “It was over there.”

  “What was, son?” Uncle Beau asked without a great deal of curiosity.

  “Whatever it was. I shot it with my ray gun and it blinked out.”

  “Well. Good work.” He took the plastic weapon, aimed it at a passing moth. Neither the eerie noise nor the whirling coils of colored light seemed to have any effect; the moth fluttered on by, ignoring the attack entirely. Uncle Beau gave the gun back. “You probably savedthe universe. Now get into your sleeping bag and hold your fire until morning so you don’t wake Maggie’s boys.”

  He dropped a kiss on Indiana’s head and sent him down the porch steps.

  “What did we all come running out here to see?” I asked bewilderedly, as Indiana squirmed back into the pup tent.

  “Pre–dinosaur age salmon flying back here in their spaceship to spawn with our grandmother, I guess,” Miranda said.

  “Well, that doesn’t make sense on any level,” Wallace declared earnestly. “Number one, fish don’t spawn with humans. Number two, why would they want somebody as old—” We were all laughing by then; he gave up. “Oh, never mind. The whole thing’s ridiculous.”

  Gage lingered with me as the others filed back in. He put his arms around me. We watched the stars, wanting and not wanting strangeness, change, danger. Wanting and not wanting aliens.

  My grandmother drove herself over the next day, as promised. She sat on the porch with a beer in her hand, listening patiently but without a great deal of attention to our questions and suggestions. Maybe she’d be happier in a place where she could make friends? Maybe her house, where she and Grandpa Scott had lived for a quarter of a century, had gotten too empty for her?

  “How would they find me if I moved?” she asked puzzledly, causing Uncle Beau, grilling burgers for lunch, to flip a patty onto the lawn.

  “Why,” he demanded, “do you want a bunch of mutant fish to find you?”

  “Oh, hush, Beau,” Greer said, though my grandmother seemed to be doing a fine job of ignoring everyone. She sat in the glider with Bertram on her lap and Fargo pushed close against her. Her shoes were off; she ran fingers through her hair, smiling gently into the summer breeze. She was there and not there, waiting for someone who hadn’t yet arrived. She looked, I thought incredulously, exactly like a woman in love.

  “Grandma Abby?” I said, my voice going small, childish.

  She looked at me, still smiling, without seeing me. “Yes, dear?”

  “Mom,” Sabrina said gently, sitting on the other side of Fargo, rocking the glider with the tip of her shoe. “We’re worried about you. This story about space aliens—it can’t possibly be true. Why would you make something like that up?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t, would I?” she answered, taking a small, precise sip of beer. “That would be just silly.”

  “We’d like to make an appointment for you with Dr. Gammon. Okay, Mom?”

  She shrugged. “I feel fine.”

  “I—we thought maybe you could have a little chat with him. About your aliens.”

  My grandmother’s expression changed; she looked directly at her oldest child, her lips thinning. “My aliens. You don’t believe anything I’ve said.”

  Sabrina drew a big breath, let it out. “Not a word.”

  “Well.” Grandma Abby leaned back again, her gaze shifting back to the horizon that, last night, we had all stared at, mesmerized by intimations of aliens. “You weren’t there, were you.”

  Sabrina rolled her eyes at the porch roof, shook her head mutely. She got up after a moment, went inside to make the phone call, I guessed. I left my perch on the porch railing, and went to lean on the glider frame. Bertram was asleep on my grandmother’s lap; Fargo uncurled into the space Sabrina had vacated, propped his head on a cushion and hummed a faint little tune while he ran a tiny toy Ferrari up and down his bare leg. Aunt Greer was setting the picnic table; Miranda and Wallace had wandered off into the trees. I heard Gage inside the house, playing some kind of online game with Holly’s boys.


  I said very softly, “What are they like, Gran?”

  She answered after a moment, still watching the empty sky above the trees. “Like nothing you could possibly imagine.”

  I tried anyway. The swamp monster? Something dark, mysterious, capable of passion? A silvery, scaly Cary Grant? A reptilian creature with three sets of teeth and a sense of humor? A being that could change its shape to match anything you wanted?

  I studied my grandmother, with her short white hair, her skin drooping, melting away from her bones. I had inherited her blue-gray eyes, her oval face, her hair that once had been heavy, dark, and smooth. With a sudden prickle of premonition I saw myself in her, that alien in me, waiting patiently, appearing little by little, line by line, hair by turning hair, until one day I was taken over by nothing I could possibly have imagined.

  She glanced behind her, listening for Sabrina, and began to stand up. I took Bertram from her before he woke. Uncle Beau and Aunt Greer had their backs to her, turning hot dogs and burgers on the grill. “I have to go,” she whispered, and put her forefinger on her lips. She touched my lips with that finger, that kiss.

  “I’ll come with you, Gran. Let me come. Let me see.”

  She shook her head, picked up her sandals, walked quietly down the steps. “They only come if I’m alone.”

  “Gran—”

  “I’ll call you later, I promise.”

  “Don’t go anywhere,” I begged, and she smiled again, that look back in her eyes of anticipating wonders.

  Years later, when I was middle-aged and she was very old, I went to visit her at the rest home and she broke her very long silence. I had wheeled her outside to the tiny, sunny rose garden; I sat on a bench beside her, amusing her with tales of Bertram’s upcoming wedding, which at that point in the preparations involved surfboards.

  Reminded, maybe by the fierce, underlying point of all the froth and bother, she said out of the blue, “Something must have disturbed them. Frightened them away. Or they saw something that they couldn’t make sense of in their terms. You know. They interpreted it badly.” Oddly enough, after all that time I knew exactly what she was talking about. “That night when you called me from Beau and Greer’s house, that was the last night I saw them.”