That explanation made sense to me, and anyway, the location was convenient in a lot of ways; in addition to the mall, there was a shopping center nearby with a Safeway and then another center with a Home Depot and a bunch of other useful places. Having everything clustered together like that meant my brother wouldn’t have to go very far to get what he needed.
After peeking out the window to make sure no flying saucers were hovering overhead, just waiting to beam me away, I wandered idly around the apartment, looking but not touching anything. Michael’s laptop was closed, and I wouldn’t snoop, but his big desktop computer with the thirty-inch screen had been left on. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what was on there, though, because the screen was covered in formulas and notations and wireframe models of what could have been a black hole, or maybe a coffee filter. To tell the truth, I wasn’t even exactly sure what he was writing his dissertation on. Something insanely technical that he could debate for hours with our father, but made my eyes want to roll back in my head whenever he tried to explain.
There were more notebooks piled on the computer desk. And the middle drawer was partway open, as if Michael had been about to start rummaging in there for a pen or something when I’d knocked at the door.
A flash of color inside that drawer caught my eye, and I sidled closer so I could take a look. Maybe that wasn’t a very nice thing to do, but right then I was just trying to keep myself from brooding about Gideon, about what might be happening to him at that very moment. I hated to think what his father might do to him in retaliation for his act of defiance.
What I’d spotted in the desk drawer turned out to be a photograph. I even recognized it, because an identical one sat on the mantel in the living room at my parents’ house. It was a snapshot Lance had taken with his phone, a picture that Kara had liked so much, she’d gotten duplicates made at the local drugstore and then had given them to everyone.
The photo was from a barbecue last summer at the Rineharts’, everyone looking tanned and relaxed and happy after an afternoon of splashing in the creek and enjoying the shade of the big oak trees that sheltered its banks. Callista and I were caught mid-giggle, while Grace stood behind us, annoying the crap out of her younger brother Kevin by tousling his already messy bright blond hair. Their little sister Melissa looked on, grinning.
And off to the side, there was Kelsey, looking bright and windblown and casually gorgeous in her cutoff shorts and tank top while she gave the whole group an indulgent smile. That side of the photo was slightly dog-eared and rumpled, as if it had been handled much more often than the other.
What in the world?
It was a not-so-secret secret in our little extended family that Kelsey had had a crush on Michael for years. He’d ignored her attentions as best he could, and because my brother was one of those rare people whose thoughts I couldn’t read, I never could figure out exactly how he felt about her — whether he was embarrassed by being crushed on by the daughter of a family friend like that, or whether he was simply so absorbed by his studies that he couldn’t be bothered to waste any mental energy worrying about the situation.
But this photo —
It hadn’t been handled that often because Grace was in it; she and Michael didn’t get along all that well. And he’d never paid much attention to Callista, except to tease her the same way he’d tease me, like she was just another little sister.
Kelsey, though….
Had he been hiding feelings for her all this time? What would be the point?
Well, the point was that he didn’t think he had time for a girlfriend. He’d had a few casual girlfriends in high school, but by the time he got to college, he was pretty focused. If he’d dated anybody during his time at NAU, those relationships clearly weren’t serious enough for him to mention them to his family.
The door opened then and I started, turning guiltily toward it, photo still in my hand. Michael came into the apartment, hands full with shopping bags, and then stopped when he saw what I was holding. The frown came back full force.
“Sorry,” I said immediately. “Your desk drawer was partly open, and I saw this….”
He didn’t reply. In silence, he went over to the drop-leaf table that was placed up against the wall in the dining area and deposited the shopping bags on it. When he turned around, he said, “Look, I know you’ve been through a lot, but that doesn’t give you the right — ”
“I know. It doesn’t.” I slipped the photo back into the desk drawer and then shut it. “But Michael — ”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” He unzipped his jacket and hung it on the coat rack. Without looking at me, he went on, “I got everything you asked for. Just please don’t ask me to buy you a bra again, okay?”
“I won’t.” I approached the table and gathered up the bags. “Thanks for this, Michael. I’ll go change now.”
“Sure.”
Still with that grim set to his mouth, he went over to the sofa, sat down, and opened up his laptop. I decided it was probably better not to say anything else right then. Michael’s usual strategy when he was upset about something was to take refuge in his work, and I figured I should probably give him a little cooling-down time.
Taking the bags with me, I headed into the bathroom. At least I could trust my brother to have a reasonably clean bath. He didn’t mind a little clutter, but he hated dirt.
He really had gotten me everything I’d asked for. I slipped off my borrowed dress and then pulled on the new jeans, along with the bra and the black long-sleeved T-shirt I found in a different bag. He’d gotten me some black flats, and I put them on as well.
It did feel strange to be wearing regular clothes after spending almost two weeks wandering around in those flowy dresses that were just a step up from a nightgown. I finger-combed my unruly hair as best I could, then took a breath and headed back out to the living room.
At least Michael looked up from his laptop when I came in. That meant he was probably still annoyed with me, but not so angry that he would keep typing away without even acknowledging my presence.
“Feel better?” he asked.
“Much,” I replied. The couch was the only real place to sit, unless I appropriated the desk chair. I didn’t know which was the better choice, so I went and perched at the far end of the sofa.
“You really need to call Mom and Dad, you know.”
I knew that. And of course I would…eventually. But the second I got in contact with them, the whole UFO-hunting crew would come down on me, wanting to know every last detail of what had happened on board the Reptilian ship.
I was still trying to figure that out for myself.
So I muttered, “Yeah, I know,” then picked up the bottle of water Michael had fetched for me earlier and took a few sips. He was studiously not paying attention to me, his gaze fixed on the screen before him.
A few seconds later, though, he closed the computer and expelled an annoyed-sounding breath through his lips. “Are you going to tell her?”
Playing dumb, I asked, “Am I going to tell who what?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
I played with the cap on the bottle. “You know I wouldn’t,” I told him. He didn’t look all that relieved, however. “I guess I just don’t understand why you thought you had to hide it all this time. You know everyone in the family would be thrilled if you and Kelsey got together.”
“Even Grace?” he asked, tone ironic. He’d never gone into any details, of course, but that one date our mothers had kind of forced on him and Grace Rinehart must have been spectacularly disastrous for him to still be put off by it years later.
“I think especially Grace,” I replied. She really did just want the best for him. Of course, it was easy to be magnanimous when everything in your own love life was going well.
He was silent for a moment, pondering my reply. Then his shoulders lifted, and he gave a brief glance around the apartment. “I suppose I didn’t feel as if I was in a posi
tion to start anything. School takes up all my time. Besides, look at this place. I doubt Kelsey would want to be cramped in a crappy one-bedroom apartment. Just her room at her parents’ house is almost as big as this.”
“And that’s the only reason?”
“Jesus, Taryn. Aren’t I the one who’s supposed to be asking you questions? Just what the hell did happen up there?”
Damn it. I really wasn’t ready to talk about that yet. But I should have known that Michael wouldn’t allow me to stick on the topic of him and Kelsey for very long. Would admitting that he felt something for her — even if he had done so very obliquely — be enough for him to bring things out in the open? I didn’t know. And even though I couldn’t read his mind, I knew my brother well enough to know when I needed to back off.
“Nothing happened,” I said in a careless tone that I doubted fooled my brother for an instant. “They were studying me, but not in an invasive way. No anal probes or anything like that.”
A pained expression crossed Michael’s face at the phrase “anal probe.” He really hated that stuff because it was the sort of thing he’d invariably get teased about once people found out that his father was Paul Oliver, the famous ufologist. Everyone seemed to conveniently forget that he’d been an astronomer and double Ph.D. before he was a UFO expert. I supposed no one was laughing very hard now, though, since those aliens had turned out to be all too real.
There probably hadn’t been any anal probes at the Reptilians’ meetings with the President, though.
“Studying you. How?”
“They wanted me because I’m psychic. That is, a human who’s psychic. Callista wasn’t worth as much to them because she’s mostly Pleiadian and is expected to have unusual powers. But me?” I shrugged. “I’m a freak.”
“You’re not a freak,” he said immediately. We’d had this almost identical exchange numerous times in the past, and he was probably getting fairly tired of it.
“Okay, an anomaly. I can’t say a biological sport, exactly, because Mom has her own set of powers, even if they’re not identical to mine.”
“So they examined you?”
“Um, not really.”
That reply only made the puzzled frown my brother wore deepen that much more. “So what did they do?”
I didn’t know how to reply. I turned the bottle of water I held around and around in my hands, knowing I’d have to tell him something but not sure what that something should be. If I started talking about Gideon, then it would come out soon enough that a fairly weird dynamic had developed between the two of us. It wasn’t really the sort of thing I felt comfortable discussing with my brother. Yes, he’d always been there to watch my back, but I knew better than to confide in him when it came to boy stuff.
Boy stuff. There was a joke. I didn’t really know how to classify my strange relationship with Gideon, but it was about as similar to the casual relationships I’d had with the few guys I’d dated as the Reptilians’ starship was to a tugboat.
So I drank some more water while Michael watched me with an increasingly concerned expression on his face.
“Taryn…if they hurt you, we need to know. If nothing else, we need to get you to a doctor — ”
“I don’t need to go to the doctor,” I broke in. “No one hurt me. No one even really touched me.” I figured it was probably best not to mention how Gideon had grabbed me by the arm that one time. “I guess they decided I wasn’t worth wasting any more energy on, so they let me go. You know it happens all the time with abduction cases. The aliens get what they want — whatever that is — and then they release the abductees. Why should I be any different?”
“Because they were pretty blatant about it this time, from what Kirsten and Martin had to say about what happened. This wasn’t your standard ‘abducted from a deserted highway’ scenario.”
He was right, of course. And, being Michael, he wanted concrete answers. He dealt with facts and numbers and formulas. True, you had to be something of a dreamer to want to spend your life staring up into the night sky, but only up to a point. After that, the hard data needed to kick in.
“Well, they didn’t tell me,” I said. “So I don’t have any answers for you, Michael.”
I hated to lie…if I really even was lying. After all, Gideon hadn’t articulated his specific reasons for getting rid of me, although it didn’t require a rocket scientist to figure out that his father had demanded that he do the unthinkable, and Gideon had almost capitulated before coming to his senses.
A long silence. Michael took his laptop and set it down on the coffee table. Without exactly looking at me, he asked, “Are you hungry?”
A rush of relief went over me. I knew that question meant he didn’t intend to pry any more. Most likely he knew that my parents — and the rest of the group — would put me through the wringer anyway, and so he didn’t see the point in bothering me when I was tired and clearly a little shell-shocked.
And maybe he was also thinking that if he didn’t push me on this, then I wouldn’t push him about Kelsey. Which was correct. I didn’t think I could let the matter slide completely, but I had a whole lot of other things to worry about besides my brother’s love life, or lack thereof. I certainly wouldn’t say anything to Kelsey. Why get her hopes up when I didn’t know if my brother would ever get the guts to talk to her honestly?
So I told Michael I was hungry, and he suggested pizza, and I said that sounded like a great idea. After all that time with basically no carbs, I felt as if I could eat two or three pizzas on my own, and possibly a couple of loaves of bread, too.
We both studiously avoided talking about anything except trivial stuff. And that was good, because I’d begun to have the oddest sensation, like a building force somewhere off in the distance, the way you could feel the pressure drop that preceded a thunderstorm like a physical weight on your chest.
I didn’t know what it was, but I worried that a very different type of storm was coming.
CHAPTER SEVEN
My parents came and got me the next day. Michael was the one who called them, actually, because when the moment came, I found I didn’t have the nerve to say that I’d been returned the day before. The truth came out while he was on the phone, of course, but I figured my parents would have the entire drive up to Flagstaff to shake off their worry and anger.
Well, some, anyway. When Michael opened the door to their knock, both my mother and father looked uncharacteristically grim-faced. But we weren’t the kind of family to have explosive arguments, and so Michael more or less handed me off in a casually civil manner, saying he needed to get back to work but that he’d come down to Sedona on the weekend if he had the time.
That comment didn’t exactly mollify them, but my mother did look slightly less strained, and even managed something of a smile. “We’ll see you then,” she said, just before she gave him a quick hug.
We walked to the family SUV in silence. After throwing the shopping bag with my meager belongings in the cargo area, I climbed into the back seat. Still no one said anything until my father was pulling onto the interstate.
Then, in the sort of quiet tones I knew were a sign of how truly angry he was, my father said, “Do you want to explain yourself, Taryn?”
No, I really didn’t. And since I could feel the mixture of worry and anger that surrounded him, that he was angry with me precisely because he had been so worried, I did what I could to temper my reply. “I know it’s hard for you to understand. But I’d just gone through…something…and being at Michael’s place seemed the best way for me to decompress.”
“I can understand not wanting to get mobbed right away,” my mother put in. “But you could have called to let us know you were all right. Or had Michael call, if you didn’t want to talk to anyone else right then.”
An entirely logical request. And if our family dynamic had been different, maybe I would have called right away. But…. “So are you taking me home first, or are we going straight to Kara’s hou
se?”
My parents looked at each other. Then my mother gave a rueful little smile as she said, “We’re taking you home, and they’ll come there rather than having us over at Kara and Lance’s place. But naturally everyone wants to talk to you.”
Naturally. “And that’s exactly what I wanted to avoid.”
“Taryn, you can’t run from this thing,” my father said. “We don’t want to do anything that makes you uncomfortable. But the more information we have, the better-informed our decisions about what we should do next will be. And so it’s better to talk to us — especially to Martin and Raphael — while your experiences are still fresh in your mind.”
Under any other circumstances, I would have agreed completely. The thought of facing everyone, though, made me quail inside. I could hide things from Michael. I could probably even hide them from my parents. My mother had her powers, but she’d respected my boundaries and had done a remarkably good job of not prying too much. But Martin and Raphael — and, to a lesser extent, Kirsten and Callista — were their own form of psychic. Telling them as much as I could without revealing anything of what had passed between Gideon and me was going to be difficult.
I knew I didn’t have much of a choice. My parents weren’t doing this to hurt me, but they needed to know what had happened so they could pass it along to others in their UFO network. Now that the Reptilians had revealed themselves, we needed more than ever to share information.
And that was when I felt it again…that strange, looming pressure. Only this time it seemed to be coming from both my parents, a preoccupation that didn’t have anything to do with me.
“What is it?” I asked then. “What happened while I was gone?”
They exchanged another glance.
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