by David Arnold
“Stay inside, okay?”
Before anyone could ask where Lennon was going, he walked out the door.
KIT
elefint
Marrowless bones were a dime a dozen, which was a phrase Kit knew that meant “nothing special.”
But these—
These were marrowless bones like he’d never seen. These were at least a dollar a dozen, probably more.
At the base of a tree, lying on the ground like no big deal, were the bones of a hand and a head. The hand bones were wrapped around a gun. The skull lay on its side, a shattered chin, and a strange flap at the top like an open hatch. A pair of large broken glasses were on the ground, and scattered all around were teeth.
“She exploded,” said Kit.
Lennon, taking it all in: “I thought I told you to stay inside.”
“You’re not the boss of me.”
The tree itself was covered in what looked like dried blood; a large chunk of bark had been destroyed.
Monty joined them, bent down for a closer look. “He shot himself?”
“She,” said Kit.
“How do you know?” asked Monty.
Lennon pointed to the large pair of glasses on the ground. “They match the drawing inside. This was the mom.” His eyes moved up the tree, the dried blood, the stripped bark and wood where the bullet hit. “It went up through the head, looks like. And then—”
“Flies got what was left,” said Monty.
Sometimes Kit would look at the veins in his own hands and think, All these little rivers flowing through my body, keeping me alive.
Thank you, little rivers. Thank you.
Only this woman had decided she was done with her rivers.
Up by the firepit, Loretta and Nico called them over, and when they got there, Kit wished they’d never stopped at this stupid cabin. He wished they’d just split up and gone their own stupid ways.
Stuck in the ground was a little homemade cross. In front of the cross, under a blanket of snow: a small, child-size mound. Kit’s eyes burned. He felt Nico’s arm on his shoulders, but not even the arm of a new friend could wash away purple-flower thoughts, grave thoughts, and this one so small, like me.
Lennon bent down, pulled something out of the snow. It looked like a miniature shovel. “Would have taken a while. Ground this hard, shovel this small.”
“It’s not a shovel.” Kit wiped his eyes, heard his Dakota’s voice answer a question from long ago. What’s that called? he’d asked on the Paradise Twin rooftop . . . “It’s a garden trowel.”
They stood silently around the tiny grave. Out here in the death of things, so many ways for a kid to lose his rivers.
“Plenty of supplies inside,” said Monty. “Dried meats, coffee. Old candy, even.” He waved at the grave, and the bones back under the tree. “Given what we’ve found, I think we’re in the clear. Three mattresses, plenty of room for whoever wants to stay. We’ll crank the woodstove, roast up some of that deer. Kit, you’re okay with staying the night, right?”
Kit said yes, knowing Monty had already made up his mind.
“Rett.” Lennon nodded to the cabin. “Can we talk in private?”
After Lennon and Loretta were inside, Monty shook Nico’s hand. “Thanks again for storming the cabin with me. You gonna stay the night, or . . . ?”
Nico said no, she wanted to cover more ground before sunset, and with this, Kit felt the sun of his own heart complete its descent.
“Feel free to restock some stuff from the cabin before you leave,” said Monty.
Nico said she would, and then bent down and whispered in Kit’s ear: “I’ll be right back. This isn’t goodbye yet, okay?”
Given the diagrams he’d seen of the human heart, and its relatively cramped quarters, it was amazing the sheer abundance of feelings a person could experience at once: grateful for his rivers; sad for his purple-flower thoughts; happy to have new friends; sad all over again that they were leaving.
“I miss her,” said Monty, staring down at the little kid’s grave.
Nico had gone inside. It was just the two of them now.
Kit opened his mouth to say, Me too, when it occurred to him, he wasn’t sure who Monty was talking about. He had assumed Lakie, but it might just as easily have been Dakota or Monty’s own mother. Or maybe he was thinking about tomorrow. Saying goodbye to Loretta.
There were simply too many hers to miss.
And so he said nothing, and they stood like that, looking at the little cross in the ground. He thought back to the stick-figure drawing, and wondered if Elefint was down there with the kid. He hoped so. Such terrible, unending darkness.
“I’m sorry,” said Kit, still staring at the grave, only now realizing who he was apologizing to. He turned, looked up at Monty. “I’m really sorry.”
Monty’s eyes, no longer shells, were soft and full of sad light, and Kit found that he’d never meant anything more than this: “It was my fault. She was exhausted because of me. Because I was such a handful.”
“Kit.”
“Your parents are dead because my mom fell asleep. And she fell asleep because of me.”
“Kit.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“Kit—go inside. Get the others.”
Only then did Kit notice that Monty wasn’t looking at him anymore, but at something over his shoulder.
Slowly, Kit turned around.
“Hi,” said the boy in the trees. “I’m Echo.”
NICO
Ethologies
When Nico was old enough to read on her own, when she’d grown too gangly to climb into her father’s lap for a story, she took to sitting on the couch across the library, and even though they no longer read the same book at the same time, they read in the same room together, which was better than not.
“What?” she’d asked once, looking up from her book. She was halfway through her third reread of His Dark Materials, while her father was well into East of Eden.
“Hmm?” he said.
“You said . . . something about a wolf.”
“Oh. Sorry. Didn’t mean to say it out loud.”
“Are there wolves in that one?” she asked.
He closed the book, held the spot with his thumb, and she saw that spark that always came when he’d found just the right words to explain a big thought. “Daemons . . .” He pointed to the book in her hands. “Patronuses . . .” He pointed to the well-read collection of Harry Potter on the bookshelf. “It says a lot about a human character, which animal they get paired with. Take Voldemort, for example. The guy’s a snake.”
“Well, technically, one-eighth, if you—”
“I mean, he has the qualities of a snake. He sort of looks like one, talks like one, thinks like one. I find certain characters in other books have animal-like tendencies too. Maybe not explicit. But they’re there.”
Nico considered how many daemons and Patronuses in some way resembled their respective characters. And while she’d conducted a few real-world applications from the Harry Potter universe (her favorite being what she called “unforgivable cursing,” in which she created new curse words using Hogwarts terminology), she’d never thought to assign a Patronus or a daemon to characters from other books.
“Anyway.” Her father leaned back, reopened the book where his thumb had been. “One of the characters in this book is very much a wolf.”
“How can you tell?”
“You see it in the eyes, usually.”
“It’s a book, though.”
“What,” her dad said, smiling at the page. “You don’t see eyes in a book?”
Meetings
Echo sat outside, in the clearing in front of the cabin, calmly stroking the head of an orange cat. The cat was in his arms when he’d emerged from the woods, and he’d yet to part with it
.
Harry’s hackles were through the roof.
“He says he lives here,” said Monty, who’d been standing in the open door of the cabin since Echo’s arrival, watching the boy like a hawk.
Loretta crouched beside the woodstove, looking like complete shit. “How do we know he’s telling the truth?”
“I mean—” At the bedside table, Kit picked up the framed stick-figure drawing, turned it around: the tall woman with glasses labeled Mommy; the short kid with a stuffed elephant labeled Me and Elefint; and beside him, a slightly taller kid, clearly labeled Echo.
“Doesn’t mean that’s him,” said Loretta. “He could be pretending.”
“Guys. Come on.” Nico turned from the slat in the boarded-up window. She’d been staring at the Merrimack, wondering how many more hours of ground she might cover tonight. “That kid lives here. We’re not holding his house hostage.”
“I agree,” said Lennon. At the gun rack, he checked and removed all ammunition from the rifles. “We can talk about potential arrangements. Tell him about Loretta’s situation, see if he lets us stay the night. But we’re not demanding anything.” He looked around the room, each face in turn. “Right?”
Once they’d all agreed, Monty called Echo inside.
The kid looked feral—there was no other word for it. About Nico’s age, he was long and gaunt, pale white skin, a tangled mess of brown hair, and the hidey-hole face of a ferret. Monty explained their situation, told him about Loretta needing a night indoors, and apologized for barging into Echo’s home. “We didn’t know anyone was living here. Obviously, we wouldn’t have helped ourselves.”
Echo stood in the middle of the room, staring down at the cat in his hands, and said nothing. The silence was made even more uncomfortable by the extra bodies: six humans and two animals made the place feel like a medium-size closet.
“I like your cat,” said Kit.
“She’s not mine,” said Echo, his first words since entering the cabin. “St. John belongs to the woods. But she stops by sometimes. For treats.” Gently, he set the cat on the floor, watched with vague interest as the animal crept around the cabin, introducing its fur to everyone’s shins.
Harry’s eyes followed the cat’s every move.
As it approached Monty, he bent down, pet it on the head. “We certainly don’t want to be any trouble. But like I said, we’d really appreciate you letting us stay the night.”
Echo looked at him for the first time, and Nico saw a flicker of something in the kid’s eyes, a liveliness she couldn’t quite place. “I don’t really have a choice, do I?” he said.
Monty looked immediately to Loretta, and Nico could sense his internal struggle: How far was he willing to go to protect her?
“Of course you do,” said Monty. “It’s your place.”
“Right.” Echo looked around the room. “But there are five of you.” He pointed to the gun rack on the wall, where Lennon had carefully replaced each rifle as it was before he removed the bullets. “You took my ammunition, which means you don’t trust me. You made me wait outside my own house while you decided what to do with me. But right. Okay. It’s my place. My choice.”
“Should we trust you?” asked Loretta.
“The only reason you should is that I say you should. But what good is the word of someone you don’t trust?” Echo lifted a single finger, made little circles in the air. “And round and round it goes.”
Nico felt a new Vesuvius bubbling: later tonight she would draw a fifth tally on her hand, and it made no sense that she would draw that tally here, when she could be far south of here by day’s end. She’d been waiting for a window to leave, a time to say goodbye to Kit, to let him say goodbye to Harry—and yes, maybe a quick goodbye with Lennon. But Echo’s bizarre arrival now made that window seem impossible.
It was time to go.
She cleared her throat, was about to say as much, when Monty, who’d been studying the framed blueprint on the wall, said, “Is this some kind of satellite? If it’s a radio tower, I’ve never seen one like it.”
“Oh, that,” said Echo, and that liveliness in his eyes landed on Nico. “That’s the Cormorant.”
Mythologies II
“Bellringer would climb to the top of the lighthouse, strike the Bell, and its toll would fly over the sea like a cormorant and then dive into the water . . .” It was out-of-body, impossible, but it was happening. Nico followed Echo around the back of the cabin as he spoke, the lilt of his voice like a sleepy-eyed storyteller: “Skykeeper’s job, supposedly, was most important. Without her, the sun, moon, and stars would fall from the sky . . .”
He was butchering the story, clearly, though in light of what was coming into view, it hardly mattered.
As they descended the hill toward the banks of the Merrimack, around a row of bushes and trees, Nico saw the outline of a towering device mere feet from the river. Echo’s voice turned slow, his distilled rendition of Voyager in the Water grew silent, as if someone had turned down the volume of the world, and only when he was done did Nico realize she must have been logging the differences in her mind: no mention of a blowfish, no mention of an orca, Voyager is a boy, no faceless witch . . .
“What is this?” she asked.
“I told you,” said Echo. “It’s the Cormorant.”
The mechanism resembled a tall steel tree with no branches. Wide at the base, it emerged from the ground by the edge of the water, gradually narrowing as it rose some forty feet into the air. Two devices had been affixed at the top: one looked like a large open book, angled toward the sky, as if offering a story to the cosmos; just below this, a circular satellite pointed downward, toward the middle of the Merrimack River. While it wasn’t visible from the cabin, Nico recognized the outline of the device from the framed blueprint inside.
“Isn’t a cormorant a bird?” Lennon asked.
So deeply submerged in her own mind, Nico hadn’t noticed until now that Lennon and Kit and Harry were here too, nor had she noticed the old train tracks they were standing on, overgrown with weeds, running parallel to the river as far as she could see.
“Yes. A bird that flies and dives. At home in the sky and in the water.” Echo reached out, placed a palm on the base of the steel mechanism. “My family has lived here since I was a baby. Mom told us the story. She said the Cormorant received Bellringer’s toll, and then amplified it into the water”—he pointed to the middle of the river—“where it traveled to Manchester. Supposedly, the Cormorant operated on its own, but we were here to protect and maintain it. She even climbed up there a few times, said it needed work. Called herself Skykeeper . . .”
Echo’s arm fell, and he looked back at them. “It’s all bullshit, of course.”
A weight sank like a stone in Nico’s stomach. “What do you mean?”
“There’s no bell. Whatever this used to do, it had nothing to do with activating some magical fountain. It was just another electric thing. Carrying power for a bunch of stupid people who didn’t deserve it. It was a story. A way Mom could make the world feel less shitty.”
It was one thing, having internal doubts; quite another, hearing those doubts spoken aloud as fact. Doubts aside, Nico felt a sudden urgency standing in the shadow of this towering device, an energy rekindled by questions: He’d said his mom had told him the story—did that mean their parents had worked together in Manchester? Why hadn’t her father told her about the Cormorant, and why was Echo so sure it was all bullshit?
“That was your family,” Kit said quietly. He pointed to the top of the hill. “Under the tree. And the little grave. That was your mom and brother, wasn’t it?”
Echo’s answer was a strange, sad simplicity: “They were sick when I went hunting. Only, there was a storm. And a couple bad swarms, and I got lost. Three days, maybe four. When I found my way back, they were like that.”
The sadne
ss of Echo’s story was reflected in Kit’s eyes, its scope multiplied by the kid’s sweet innocence.
Daytime is dwindling, thought Nico. Harry and I could still cover some ground if we leave now, only . . .
Unable to take her eyes off Kit, she thought of the look Monty had given Loretta earlier, that young, wide love. It was a look she’d seen in her parents, and it always made her both glad and sad: Yes, love like this exists; no, you will never experience it. And while she was certain that was true, she wondered if the qualities of love were reserved for romance only, or if she might borrow a few.
She smiled at Kit.
He smiled back.
KIT
the unrealized aspirations of Echo Leibowitz
After the E.T. debacle, it had been an unspoken agreement in the Paradise Twin that the projector would ruin no more reels.
Even so, those reels had provided hours of entertainment. When held in front of candlelight, each frame was visible. Kit and Monty and Lakie used to take turns making up stories to match these images. Their favorites had been full of comedy or romance, images that conjured laughter; their least favorites were the war movies. Young men getting shot and carried off on stretchers. Young men smoking cigarettes in bunkers. People shooting people for reasons none of them could understand. Sometimes these people survived, but even when they did, they wound up with a look in their eyes that said, I’m just waiting my turn.
Echo’s face had a grime that would have made his Dakota’s head spin, and the way he spoke was like the words were a food he hadn’t chewed properly, but more than any of this: there was a look in his eyes that seemed to say, I’m just waiting my turn.
The group ate dinner inside the cabin, woodstove going strong. There were the usual suspects: Nico’s freeze-dried strawberry granola, more dried meats (of which there seemed an endless supply in the cabin cupboards), and the last jar of his Dakota’s peaches.