Lee’s lips trembled over clenched teeth as he took a shuddering breath, stood the tallest he could, and fired off a military salute to Doug, the same kind with which Major Dawkins had honored Lee at birthday barbecues. Doug, still stung by Lee’s shouting, blinked in surprise. But what had Lee been teaching him if not to be a proper soldier? Doug’s cowered back straightened, and he returned the salute.
Lee turned to Liv. He grimaced as if his legs were locked inside one of his steel-toothed traps. He opened his mouth to speak, but that, too, looked painful. What he did, then, was nothing, except look sorry, and out of time.
He whirled away, charged the fence, and lowered his ear within inches of the top wire. Liv felt eviscerated, barely able to stand, yet still understood. Her dad believed the fence to be electric, and some scrap of rural insight told her that electric fences ran in pulses, and her dad was listening for them. Liv thought she could feel them, each sizzling beat the mirror of her bruised, burned heart. Lee’s hands hovered over the wire, preparing to make his move.
Liv ran, leaving Doug behind and colliding with her father so hard he had to roll to the side to avoid the electric fence. Lizardpoint’s metal pick clacked against Mist’s sharpened blade. Somehow both father and daughter had turned lethal, too sharp to be held safely, but they held each other all the same.
“Don’t go,” she cried. “Please don’t go, please don’t go.”
He held her cheeks in his hands, but all she could feel were his gloves’ silicone grips.
“You have to let me go,” he whispered. “I have unfinished business.”
She tried to press her face into his chest, but he held her firm.
“I know you don’t believe in any of this, Liv.”
She was exposed, shamed, but also desperate to tell him that he was wrong, she did believe that he believed, and wasn’t that enough?
“Dad, I—”
He shook his head, out of time.
“It’s all right. Doug … he wants to believe. He needs to believe. He doesn’t have the choices we’ve always had. You’re a doubter like your mother. That’s good. That means you’re smart. Just listen to me, sweetie. Listen to me and then let me go. I want to say I’m sorry. For everything. How I ruined everything our life used to be. What I’ve done to your poor mother. I just … forgot things. And now it’s all coming back.”
None of it made any sense to Liv. She had a gutful of protests, enough to last all night, all day, all her life, but the stiff surfaces of his gloves slid down her face and took hold of her shoulders. He managed a pained smile and flicked his eyes up to the shadowing skies. His last words were not his, but James Galvin’s, his favorite verse, one he told seniors on the final day of class, inspiration for their future.
“‘Perhaps you didn’t realize,’” he quoted. “‘Anything can happen under a sky like this.’”
Gently, like Mr. Fleming the husband, the father, the English teacher, he held her away from his body. He unzipped his pack and withdrew his copy of Resurrection Update, wrinkled from study, bloated by rain, stained by coffee, studded with sawdust. He held it out to her. She stared at it. He prodded her in the sternum with the book until she felt her hands wrap around it. She stroked the cover. It was lightweight, she thought, for a soul.
When she next looked up, Mr. Fleming, the pariah, the lunatic, the survivalist, had one hand on a fence post, and having found the gap in pulses he was after, he climbed over the wires. To Liv it was a leap of unimaginable distance, the crossing from one world to another. He landed in a sloppy stumble, but righted himself and walked, then jogged, then ran in the direction of the silos, Lizardpoint at the ready.
By the time Doug joined her at the fence, Lee Fleming was a pale firefly. Doug must have known as well as Liv that they’d never see him again. He hoisted Maquahuitl over his head and brought it down on the fence, staving the wires downward, snapping some, bending the nearest poles inward. It was a mourning rage, violent as a cloudburst, and it would be minutes before it was through, fence posts dented to hell, wires pounded into the dirt, and Doug crying out, perhaps from electrocution, perhaps not, finishing by hammering the ground with his club until his red, grimacing face was lost in plumes of dust.
Liv felt the dry wind from Maquahuitl toss her hair, but she did not flinch. She could feel, extending from the muck of her sorrow, a different emotion, one that, like skinners, she didn’t want to believe existed. The thing was called relief. Life would be difficult without her father. But wasn’t it also true that, in some ways, life would be easier?
The book felt undeserved in her hands. Either her dad was a traitor or she was. She thought of “Sapphic Suicide Note,” and wondered if the book itself, placed into her hands, was the suicide note of her father.
She thrust the book into Doug’s arms. He tried to hand it back, but she shrugged it off. Doug was adamant; in future days, and weeks, and months, he’d keep trying to return it, telling her it was meant for her, assuring her that its poetry, just as Lee had always said, was full of secrets. She refused to talk about it, and as their relationship narrowed over the following two years to little beyond Sunday morning trap checking, Doug quit trying. Lee’s italics, whatever they were worth, belonged to Doug.
12.
Liv lifted the compass into the moonlight. The box her father had opened on his birthday had boasted scratch-resistance, but that claim had been disproven. A slash ran across its face, northeast to southwest. She couldn’t blame the manufacturers, who hadn’t worked into their calculations the trials of an alien race. The plastic wristband was notched and discolored, but the latch still worked, and she cinched it around her left wrist. It was slimy against her skin, and she heard her father’s town-square shout: Biologic evidence!
She’d given Doug her father’s notated copy of Resurrection Update, but this gift was different. He had worn this. It was a part of him. The compass still worked, wobbling in oil as she sharked her arm through the pale light. It was a good distraction until the moonlight hit the glass wrong and refracted a blob of light onto Doug, who lay curled on her floor among dirty clothes. The slow rise of his back suggested he was asleep, a state that seemed inconceivable when they’d retreated to her bedroom hours earlier.
They’d come inside because of John. He hadn’t quit barking, and who knew if Aggie, when she got home, would react to the dog’s agitation by going into the backyard. They’d fed John a second dinner and led him to Liv’s bedroom, and once there, nobody wanted to go back to the Armory. Here was a room packed with comforting, understandable objects, and inside it they’d huddled until Aggie had come home, shuffled about the kitchen, clinked wine bottle and glass, and retired to bed. Liv and Doug took the cue to lie down and stare at the ceiling. It was the innocent sleepovers of their youth turned inside out.
Doug, though, was a master sleeper, and never had Liv envied the ability more. Her eyeballs throbbed. Her chest ached from the fist-bash of her heart. Her mind raced through competing image streams of her father hopping the electric fence and the skinner zip-tied inside the shed. She had no emotions. Or perhaps had all of them at once?
She sat up. That felt better. She put her feet on the floor. The floor held. Her phone was right there. She could still call 911. Instead she stood up. Doug didn’t move. John’s eyes didn’t open. She stepped over them to the door. Her muscles cried out in relief. She entered the hall, closed the door behind her. Her legs begged to run. She could. She still wore shoes. To sprint through the night, to drown in endorphins, what a release it would be. She unlocked and opened the back door. A billion excited bugs rubbed their wings.