Two from the Heart(20)

I smiled at the old man. I said, “Sure, I’d love to come.”





Chapter 22


AFTER JORDAN fixed my flat, I followed them for a few miles to the crossroads, where I pulled my van well off the highway.

“We’ll have you back here in ten hours,” the old man, who called himself Chili, said. “A lot sooner than any tow truck’d pass by.”

And so I became a passenger for the first time in almost two weeks, tucked in the backseat between Marge, who insisted that military scientists were currently reverse-engineering a captured alien spacecraft, and Annie Rose, who claimed to have seen a bright diamond-shaped craft hovering and spinning over an Ohio cornfield last month.

The strange thing was that both of them seemed like intelligent, rational women. Annie Rose, in particular, was well versed in physics; a former professor of applied mathematics, she’d spent her retirement boning up on the possibilities of interstellar travel.

Then the man sitting in front of us, who introduced himself as Mitch, turned around and said, “I bet you haven’t heard a story like this. Last summer, I was driving home on a road I’d driven a hundred times before. But when I came around one of the curves, the highway was suddenly completely different. It had eight skinny lanes, and in each lane were dozens of little egg-shaped black cars. The sky was orange, and there were three high, jagged mountains I’d never seen before. And I just knew I’d been teleported to another dimension.”

“Personally I think he’d had a few margaritas that night,” Marge said, nudging me.

“How’d you get back to this dimension?” I asked.

Mitch shrugged. “I don’t know. I just kept driving. And I was praying, you know? Praying so hard I wasn’t even breathing. And then the highway turned a corner again, and when I got around that bend, I was back in our world.” He paused to let this sink in. “But the thing was, now I was on a totally different interstate than the one I had been on. It took me two extra hours to get home.”

“I wish something like that would happen to me,” Annie Rose said. “Then I could die happy.”

Meanwhile, the landscape we drove through looked more and more extraterrestrial: the flat tops of mesas glowing in the late afternoon sun, the cloudless sky nearly white with heat. Maybe aliens come here because it looks like their home planet, I thought wryly.

We reached our destination at dusk and spread out alongside the road. Almost everyone had brought folding chairs, and Chili set up a telescope. As we settled ourselves in, there was hardly a sound, as if everything around us were holding its breath. We watched the stars come out by the thousands. Low above the horizon, Venus shone brightly.

We waited. And waited.

“Please oh please,” I heard someone whisper.

Then I saw something streak across the sky, high and fast, and I sucked in my breath.

“What?” Marge said. “Did I miss something?”

“Only a shooting star,” Jordan assured her.

“Or, more accurately,” Annie Rose said, “the visible path of a meteoroid as it enters the earth’s atmosphere.”

Jordan snorted, but I felt a twinge of disappointment. Not that I’d really thought I’d see a UFO tonight. And come to think of it, if there were evidence of extraterrestrials, I wouldn’t want to know about it. Life was complicated enough already—I didn’t need an alien species to worry about.

I liked this oddball group of people, though, and part of me wanted them to experience something magical.

But it wasn’t to be. After a couple of beautiful but uneventful hours of staring at the stars, Chili said we should probably head back. Oddly enough, no one seemed that disappointed.

“It’s like fishing,” Mitch told me. “You can’t always catch a prizewinning bass.”

“But the fish can’t laugh at you,” Marge pointed out. “That’s what the aliens are doing. Looking down on us from superconductor-powered spaceships and hootin’ and hollerin’ over how dumb we are.”

“Speak for yourself,” Mitch said, laughing, and Marge swatted him on his elbow.

I wanted to keep listening to their stories, but it was after midnight and the humming of the wheels on the asphalt quickly lulled me to a dreamless sleep. I didn’t wake until they’d pulled up to my van.

It was still predawn when, bleary-eyed, I thanked my new friends and climbed into the driver’s seat.

And then I drove west, as the sun rose in a fiery blaze behind me.





Chapter 23


BECAUSE I stopped in Carson City to get a new tire, I didn’t arrive in Sonoma, California, until late afternoon. From a coffee shop on the square, I booked a last-minute Airbnb. I’d reached the end of the road, after all—and last night I’d slept in the alien-hunters’ van—and so I figured I could justify the splurge.

The cottage was cedar-shingled, surrounded by a wild, flowering garden and perched above a small vineyard. To the west lay green rolling hills dotted with enormous oak trees. The owners of the cottage, who lived in a big house a hundred yards away, had kindly left me a bottle of wine and a platter of fruit, cheese, and bread.

After devouring every last crumb on the plate, I took a walk along the one-lane road as night fell. The air smelled like late roses and eucalyptus, and I could hear the croak of frogs and the chirp of crickets. I walked slowly, aimlessly. There was no reason to hurry because I was no longer going anywhere. I’d arrived.