When the Sky Fell on Splendor(25)

One solid, crystalline thought rose through my mind, like a glowing pin dropped in the middle of an otherwise illegible map.

“The video,” I said.

“The video?”

“Levi put it online. It’s sort of gone viral.”

Remy pulled a face. “Are you kidding? He has to take that down, Fran! What if my dad sees it? Or the St. Jameses, or people from the energy company or—”

“I know,” I said. “I’ll tell him. But, Remy, someone commented on it and said he’d seen one of those things too. Twenty years ago.”

Remy’s eyebrows shot up. “Twenty years ago?” Tentative excitement crossed his face. “That’s great!”

Great seemed extreme. It was a lead, and not necessarily a good one.

“Twenty years and this guy’s still alive,” Remy said. “So whatever it did to him, it doesn’t sound like it . . . hurt him.”

He was going to say killed and we both knew it. We had no reason to think the thing—if YouTube user CitizenOfTheBlackMailbox had even really seen one—hadn’t maimed him or made him sick, or even that it wouldn’t kill him, eventually. We didn’t even have a reason to think the thing had entered him, like it had done to me.

But it was a start.

As long as it was real.

“He left an e-mail address,” I told Remy. “I’ll contact him as soon as I get home.”

He nodded. “And what about the others?”

“We don’t tell them.”

Remy gave me a dubious look.

“Not yet.”

Arthur was two weeks out from finally getting out of this town, and already this whole thing was threatening to suck him back in, and Sofía would tell her parents, who would tell my dad, who was just about the last person equipped to handle this.

“Just until I figure things out,” I said. “I mean, like you said, they might start remembering, but for now there’s nothing anyone can do.”

Remy grimaced. “You could go to a doctor. You don’t need to tell them what happened—just get a physical, and make sure this thing isn’t hurting you.”

And what if it is? I wanted to say. You think a dose of penicillin will kill something from another planet?

But I didn’t need to worry Remy more, and I didn’t need to think about things I couldn’t change, and I didn’t need to go to a doctor, for about a million reasons ranging from the fact that we had no insurance and hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid bills for Mark’s care to the creeping sensation whenever I remembered the comment on Levi’s video:

DELETE THIS IMMEDIATELY. THEY ARE WATCHING!

“Fran?” Remy said.

“No doctors yet either.”

He studied me for a moment then turned and leaned into the propane tank. I slumped against it too, and Droog sat at our feet, watching shadows dart through the mangy trees that separated the tracks from our field.

We just stood, listening to the conversation of the blissfully untroubled cicadas. They lived, they sang, they died. That was pretty much how it was for us too, so why did it seem so much harder than that?

“You know my problem?” Remy said finally.

“You’re tired of being objectified for your beautiful hair?” I said.

Remy set his elbows on the tank and leaned back to smile at me sidelong. “Well, yeah. Just once, I’d like to be objectified for my body. But the other thing is, even though I know better, I just can’t stop waiting for things to go back to normal. When I was a kid and my mom died. When the accident happened and my dad got hurt. And now this. It’s like I’m always waiting for things to stabilize, but they don’t.”

I studied him. “You’re having them again? The dreams?”

He averted his gaze.

Like all of us, there were things Remy didn’t talk about. But that first summer, we’d confided in each other our darkest, most miserable thoughts. We’d sat on these train tracks, though usually farther down, and we’d whispered back and forth, sharing our secrets only once, letting them disappear as soon as they were said, never to be spoken of again.

My mom can’t look at me, I told him.

I don’t remember my mother’s voice, Remy whispered.

My dad doesn’t sleep anymore.

Sometimes I wake up screaming. I see the accident. I see the beam fall on my dad’s leg.

Once, only once, I whispered, so quietly the words cut in and out: If it had been me, I don’t think she would have left them.

Every time my dad goes to work, Remy whispered back, I think he’s going to die.

The nightmares had started when Remy was six, after his mom’s aneurysm. Sometimes he dreamt about her ghost. Other times, he dreamt she was alive, and when he remembered she wasn’t, her skin withered, leaving behind her skeleton. He dreamt she had fallen off a cliff and was trying to hold on, begging him to save her. He’d wake up screaming, soaked in sweat.

His dad took him to therapy. For a few years, the dreams backed off. Then came the accident.

The sheriff had been doling out speeding tickets and traffic violations at another Splendor two-way-stop-turned-death-trap up the road from the mill when he got the call.

He’d been the first one on the scene, before paramedics and fire trucks.

He’d seen the smoke and the ash and heard the screams, and he hadn’t had any backup or even a fire extinguisher.