The Spaceship Next Door

by Gene Doucette

  There was something distinctively odd about Vogel’s movements. His gestures were halting. Jerky, almost. Somewhere between Frankenstein’s monster and a marionette.

  Hank Vogel had a few years on Sam. He was a stocky kind of big, not super bright, but friendly enough. Sam would never say Hank was graceful, but he wasn’t usually as stiff as this, either.

  He was stopping every few feet along the central corridor, standing at the end of each cot and looking at the occupants. The stare lasted eight or ten seconds, it seemed.

  “Holy crap, I bet he’s sleepwalking,” Dill said.

  “Could be.”

  Hank’s eyes were definitely open. It was hard to tell if he was awake behind them.

  “What should we do?”

  “Maybe leave him be, I’m sure he’ll go back to bed soon enough.”

  “Hank!” Dill whispered.

  “C’mon, leave him alone.”

  “No this is too good. Hank!”

  Vogel turned at the sound, and sleep-wandered his way to the base of the bed.

  “How you doin’, Hank?” Dill asked, waving his hand in front of Vogel’s face.

  Hank didn’t respond. It was just about the creepiest non-response ever. Sam was beginning to dislike this. Dill felt no similar qualms.

  “You in there, Corporal Vogel?”

  Hank opened his mouth.

  “Dill…” Sam said.

  “Shh. What is it, Hank?”

  “Are… you…?”

  Hank spoke like he had a mouthful of food and didn’t know where his tongue was supposed to be.

  “What’s that?” Dill asked. He hopped off the bunk. Hank—who was taller than both of them—towered above.

  “Are you,” Hank repeated.

  “Sam, should we wake him?”

  Sam remembered being told to never awaken a sleepwalker. He thought it was probably just one of those things people said that wasn’t actually true, but Hank wasn’t hurting anybody, so why risk it?

  “No, leave him be.”

  “Are you,” Hank said again.

  “Am I? No. I don’t think I am.”

  “Dill…”

  “Well I don’t know how else to answer.”

  Hank lowered his gaze from Dill and turned to head down the aisle, and then Dill did something dumb. It was, in all fairness, something that only came off as really stupid in hindsight, but still.

  When Vogel turned, Dill put his hand on the sleeping man’s shoulder.

  “Hold on, Hank, let’s talk this…”

  Corporal Vogel’s reaction was sudden and alarming. His left hand lashed out and clamped around Dill’s throat.

  Dill emitted a gurgling shout, with both his hands around the larger man’s arm.

  “Choking…” he cried. “Choking me…”

  “Hank!” Sam exclaimed.

  He was up in a second, his arm around Vogel’s, trying to peel the fingers loose. Dill was beet-red already. Vogel was going to kill him.

  “HELP!” Sam shouted. “HELP US!”

  Four men from neighboring bunks stirred, realized what was wrong, and jumped in, but Vogel’s grip was like iron, and efforts to tackle him were proving strangely impossible.

  “Wake up Hank!” Sam said. “Come on, you’re killing him!”

  Arms and legs and bodies pulling and shouting, but Vogel was like a rock. A rock that wanted to crush Dill Louboutin’s windpipe.

  Finally, someone had the idea to slap Hank Vogel across the face.

  He trembled, his eyes blinked, and he released Dill, who fell gasping to the floor.

  It was said later that in this moment, it looked as if Corporal Vogel became aware of himself and his surroundings. Like he’d been away for a while and just returned to discover himself in entirely the wrong place. Then the moment passed, and Hank started to convulse.

  “Hold him, hold him,” Sam said. Vogel was falling backwards, arms flailing madly. His eyes, still open, had rolled back in his skull and there was foam coming out of his mouth.

  They got him to the floor, where he continued to seize.

  “Get him something to bite down on!” somebody shouted. Sam was on top of the larger man, trying to hold his body still before he broke himself or something else.

  “Like what?” someone else said. Half the barracks were awake now.

  “I don’t know!”

  Sam said, “get the medics in here, for Chrissake!”

  Then, quite dramatically, Hank Vogel seized up, held his entire body stiff in a huge inhale, and then stopped and collapsed. His arms and legs fell limp and his eyelids fell shut.

  Sam put his finger on Vogel’s neck and listened to his lungs.

  What the hell just happened?

  “I don’t think he’s breathing!” Sam said. “Where’s the medic?”

  11

  Midnight in the Garden

  The phone call that was supposed to come from the hospital the next morning—the one notifying Annie that her mother was being released momentarily—didn’t come. Not that there was no phone call, only that the one she received involved a very different conversation.

  Annie didn’t realize exactly how much she failed to pay attention to the information being recited over the phone until it came time to repeat it to others. Ed, and later Violet, and after that her father, all received partial bits of things that didn’t entirely add up to a comprehensive whole. It didn’t fit into her head that way neither, so that was only fair.

  The short version was that Carol wasn’t coming home and she wasn’t staying at Harbridge. She was being transported to Boston, where a medical facility with first-class oncology support was located. There, she would be tested and an approach would be devised, and the question of chemo came up, and phrases like as comfortable as possible and managing the condition were bandied about, and just about all of it made Annie’s eyes burn.

  As she explained to the doctor—his name was either “doctor Benson” or “doctor Ben Song”, she couldn’t tell—Carol did a round of chemo before, when she was first diagnosed, and it nearly killed her. It was Annie’s understanding that there would be no more chemotherapy. Her mother would rather die on her own terms than live on theirs, and that was that. She asked the doctor if Carol repeated this declaration.

  She had, but doctor Bensomething had a lot to say on that point, along the lines of therapeutic changes and options and the importance of thorough diagnoses, and Annie gave up trying to figure out how it all ended up playing out because at the end of the call her mother was still heading off to the city, whether she wanted to or not.

  Annie was tacitly not going to Boston.

  She could have. Even though she was only sixteen and had neither the money nor the wherewithal to get a hotel room, and even though she had no relatives in the Boston area, there were options. She’d done this before, the last time Carol ended up in the city for a chemo session. The hospital had a program in place that could put her up short-term in something like a halfway house that was a cross section of people going through outpatient cancer screenings and their family members. When she did it, a guardian was appointed to keep an eye on her, and she hated every second of the experience.

  It was terrible to admit, but when her mother exited chemo and swore she would never go back, Annie was glad to hear it. Carol was essentially saying she’d rather die at home sooner than in a hospital later, but all Annie could think was that she’d never have to go back to that halfway house again.

  She was being incredibly selfish, and she knew it. If she had a therapist, that therapist would undoubtedly be all over her. Nonetheless, the reality was unchanged: Annie had no intention of going to Boston. In the event she had to get to the city—for instance if Carol took a “turn for the worst” (this was her least-favorite euphemism for dying) Annie could always reach out to Desmond Hollis, who would probably send her into town by helicopter if he had to.

  Annie deciding to stay in Sorrow Falls created a whole new set of probl
ems, though.

  In hindsight, the whole issue could be placed at the feet of Carol Collins, because sometime after the last chemo session and the current emergency, Carol decided to eradicate all negative thoughts from her life. In a very basic way, this made sense, because there was some evidence to suggest cancer patients with positive outlooks tended to do better. The idea of being healthy could impact the health, essentially.

  But there was a difference between trying to be positive and refusing to anticipate a circumstance in which that positivity would be inadequate. Specifically, Carol made no concrete plans for her daughter in the event she wasn’t there to perform her duties as The Adult.

  Anyone who met the two of them in the past two years would have drawn the entirely appropriate conclusion that Annie was playing the role of The Adult, but the problem was that this wasn’t in any real way a legal designation. If her mother was unavailable to perform her duties as guardian, the task fell to her father, but when she spoke to him about Carol’s condition he made it clear he would be unable to return to Sorrow Falls in anything like a reasonable period of time. (He said he was in Manitoba, which wasn’t just north of them but considerably west. Annie wouldn’t have time to appreciate this until later, but clearly Hollis’s paper trees made quite a circuitous route to the mill.)

  All of this meant she had no available adult to pretend to tell her what to do and make sure she didn’t set herself on fire or subsist on chocolate bars and vodka, or wander into traffic, or whatever it was she was supposed to end up doing if unsupervised. It was completely crazy, because anyone who knew her at all knew she could take care of herself perfectly fine.

  Her initial efforts, then, were to deflect the concern of the people holding themselves responsible for her.

  At first, the hospital was pretty easy to fool. Doctor Ben asked if there was an adult guardian, and Annie said yes of course, her father lived with them, and this was technically not a lie because he had a room there. Carol backed her up, too.

  Someone blabbed. Annie thought it was probably Lee, the paramedic, although just about anybody from Sorrow Falls could have been the source, as it wasn’t exactly a secret. So then they told her she had to have an adult in the house when the ambulance people came by with Carol, to verify that a legal adult was there, even if that adult wasn’t her father.

  The adult ended up being Ed, which turned the day into possibly the most awkward thing in the history of awkward things. Because when Annie asked Ed to come into the house she didn’t tell him he was donating his services as guardian, right up until someone handed him a document to sign.

  He did sign, which was great, because that meant one set of adults was going to leave her alone. But as with many of the things that made sense in her head, this did not solve Annie’s problem.

  * * *

  “I’m sorry, did I just adopt you?”

  “Don’t be so dramatic. Of course not. I just needed to get rid of those guys. You can take off now, I think they have a big enough head start.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  It was Saturday, and they had no plans to continue the interviews again until Tuesday, at which time they would be visiting City Hall, talking to some of the long-term resident/owners of the area businesses and, at the end of the day, Desmond Hollis. Annie was expecting it to be far less interesting than, for example, talking to the picketers at the end of Main might be, because those guys were entertaining as hell. Although Desmond was always worth the time.

  Anyway, they had no place to go for the weekend, so he had no reason to stick around.

  “I have plenty of food and everything, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she said. “We keep a well-stocked freezer. We pack for long winters around here.”

  “I’m worried that I just agreed to make sure a minor is being taken care of. If something happens to you, I’m in a ton of trouble.”

  “Okay. A little self-centered, but okay.”

  “In addition to it being bad that something happened to you. Annie, you just maneuvered me into being your legal guardian until one of your parents gets back, did you even read what they made me sign?”

  “Well yeah, but, I mean, c’mon, do you know how long I’ve been taking care of myself? Ask anyone.”

  “Your degree of self-governance was something arranged by your mother, and I guess your father, if he’s… wherever he is. Now I’m the one who gets to make sure you don’t die in a fire or fall through a hole in the floor. And no, you cannot stay on the base, and you definitely can’t stay in the B&B with me.”

  He had clearly visited the part of the house where there were holes in the floor.

  “I wasn’t going to ask to. I’m fine.”

  “You can’t stay here, Annie.”

  “You can’t make me leave.”

  “Actually, I just signed some documents that say I can do exactly that.”

  Annie sighed. “Well that’s not gonna work. Do you want to stay here? I’ll show you where all the holes in the floor are.”

  “That’s not going to work either. You keep telling me everyone in town knows you, and so far that’s ended up being true. There must be someone you can stay with.”

  And that was how she ended up at Violet’s house.

  * * *

  The handoff was a lot stranger than it should have been, mainly because, somehow, Annie never spent the night at Violet’s house before. Vi spent many a night at Annie’s, hanging out with her and Carol and watching movies, and doing things girls did, like talking about quantum theory and orbital mechanics.

  And boys, sometimes. Especially before the ship landed, when there wasn’t much else going on in Sorrow Falls aside from The Coming Puberty.

  This was not to say Violet had anything particularly compelling to offer when engaged in a discussion of boys and girls and how they might interact socially, sexually or academically. It was perfectly understandable for someone home-schooled to have effectively no opinion on boys she’d never met, met only once, or only seen from a distance. At the same time, her lack of interest in developing a more robust understanding of the available local options seemed to go beyond her innate social awkwardness. At times, in other words, Annie wondered if her friend might be gay.

  As explanations went, it was a pretty good one. She’d never asked, in part because she wasn’t sure if Violet even knew yet. It also seemed sort of rude. It was one of those things you waited for the other person to bring up.

  The ship was sort of a welcome icebreaker, in that sense. Once it landed she and Violet had a ream of other things to discuss. It was an almost bottomless pool of things, actually, because Vi was some sort of genius. This was another thing Annie didn’t really come out and just ask, but unlike the gay thing, the genius aspect of her friend was more or less assumed.

  In home-schooling their daughter, Violet’s parents decided early on to concentrate on science and math to the virtual exclusion of all other disciplines. How they got away with this, Annie didn’t know—she was pretty sure the state required some sort of testing for the home-schooled, and could only assume Vi tested out okay since she’d not heard otherwise. Anyway, it didn’t seem as if Violet had any issues with reading and writing, and if her grasp of history was a little general (aside from movies) it was still good enough to convince whoever regulated these things to let her slide.

  Her understanding of science—physics, more so than biology—was, in Annie’s opinion, the coolest thing about her friend. It was also incredibly helpful; Annie learned way more from Vi than from school or from her friends at the campers. It was Violet’s information that helped Annie sort out the good theories from the bad.

  While it was true their conversations about applied and theoretical science were frequent, they didn’t generally take place in Violet’s home, a place Annie had only been inside of a few times. She’d seen the kitchen, the living room, and Vi’s bedroom, but only in passing.

  Carol probably should have made arrangements fo
r Annie for this kind of thing. Carol met Vi’s mom—Annie always called her Susan, as this was one of those households which eschewed titles like ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’—two or three times and had nice things to say about her and all, but at no point did anyone discuss an emergency plan. This was (again) pretty much Carol’s fault, as her think positive! attitude sometimes precluded a but plan for the worst! corollary, but Mrs. Susan Jones could have also stepped up and volunteered.

  This was what Annie was thinking as the parties Edgar/Annie and Violet/Susan met in Vi’s kitchen to work out the care and feeding of Annie Collins, Defenseless Child.

  “You want her to stay?” Susan asked. She was literally repeating what Ed just asked, right after the two of them went through the hospitalization of Carol and Ed’s accidental guardianship. Susan came off as dully shocked at his temerity, which was a little odd given anyone could have figured out why they were there before they even made it to the kitchen table.

  “Yes, you see… if that’s all right…” Ed stumbled.

  “Of course she can stay,” Violet said.

  “Yes, of course,” Susan said. She smiled.

  Then nobody talked for a few seconds. It was incredibly awkward.

  Annie had little direct experience with Susan. She was a thin woman with—according to her daughter—an enthusiasm for macrobiotics coupled with vitamin supplements that pushed her body somewhere past healthy and into so-healthy-she-might-be-unwell territory. There were moments, in speaking with her, in which she sometimes seemed to check out a little, as if her mind were on something more important. This happened at the oddest of times, such as this particular one.

  “I’ll go get the room ready,” Violet said.

  “I’ll help,” Annie said, very much ready to get out of the room.

  “No, you stay. I’m sure you have to work out everything with… Edgar, isn’t it? It’s nice to meet you.”

  “And you,” Ed said. “I’ve heard a lot.”

  This was just him attempting to be polite, as he’d heard almost nothing. He was only slightly less socially awkward than Violet’s family.