Mist made opening the door difficult. Abruptly, then, Liv was indoors, a landscape as foreign to A as the alien ship would have been to Lee. Liv found herself experiencing it as a skinner might. The baffling variety of stovetop, table lamp, and laptop-charger lights. The druid drone of the refrigerator. The blunt odor of air freshener. The taste of still air, like paint. Liv lived here, this was her home, but it was only through muscle memory that she was able to carry A down the hall, past the closed door behind which her mom snored, and into her own bedroom. John followed and settled on the floor, looking worried.
The bedsprings didn’t react to A’s weight. Liv dropped Mist and gingerly began to unwrap the tarp. A’s flesh emerged, stripe by pallid stripe. The skinner had never looked as freakish as it did here, beneath the Midwestern tableau of pennants and posters. Liv had the bewildering sensation that she was seeing herself on the bed, and this was simply what she’d always looked like just under the surface.
Using a sweatshirt, she dried A off. It was freezing cold, still. She grabbed the far end of the blanket and folded it over A, then folded over the other end as well. A moved then, at last, a series of epileptic convulsions, and Liv panicked, folding up the sheet, then the mattress cover, as much material as possible, snugging it around the alien and tucking it tight. It wasn’t enough; the tremors continued. A was going to shiver itself to death, right here in her bed, if she didn’t do something.
So instead of setting up her computer and finally getting down to the business of Carbajal, she crawled into the bed. She didn’t know what made her do it. Stories she’d read, maybe, of stranded mountain climbers surviving with body heat. Liv parted the layers of blankets and slid beside A, pressing close. It was nothing like it had been with Bruno in the costume room, where each part of her had found a natural opposite. Nothing fit. A’s round head rolled off her cheek like a ball she couldn’t balance. Its shoulder bone jabbed her sternum. Its backward-bent legs pressed painfully against her shins.
None of it mattered. She curled her arms around A’s cool, fragile body and held tight. It shivered. Was it because of bodily chill or her aberrant human touch? She placed her lips against its earholes and shushed like she used to shush John when he was agitated by thunder, except in these shushes she hid words: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. She stroked A, too, hoping to generate warmth, her fingertips still surprised by the terrain of webbed membranes, bony extrusions, and shriveled tumors. She closed her eyes and told herself that this was Bruno. Or her mother, or her father, anyone at all overdue for embrace.
Soon she didn’t know the difference between A’s extremities and her own. The skinner’s heart recovered a stable tempo, and Liv’s breathing, in response, leveled off. From under her own ribs radiated an unexpected feeling. It wasn’t happiness—there was too much to fear—but it was, she thought, a type of contentment, maybe brought on by exhaustion, maybe not. The police could wait until morning. Right now, A needed warmth and sleep before suffering renewed trials.
Liv closed her eyes, cupped A’s head, and tucked it beneath her chin. There, it fit after all. Tomorrow, she told herself. Her confession to police, the fallout, the taking away of A—all sorts of hell could be confronted tomorrow. Tonight she was tired. It seemed as if her bed was a box of fine sand, and she sank into it until she was covered. She fell asleep and had a dream that felt very real: A’s thick, three-fingered hands moving clumsily across her body as it tried to pull bits of bedsheet over the scrapes she’d suffered in the shed, bandaging Liv as she, for so long, had bandaged it.
25.
Sunday. It had to be Sunday. Liv would tell herself later that, given her slumberous fog, she could be forgiven for mistaking the day as one from the past two years: the knocking sounds (Doug rapping at the window), rustling sounds (Doug collecting John’s feces in a bag), and thumping sounds (Doug raiding the kitchen for Pop-Tarts). Liv threw an arm over her eyes, prepared her usual reply of Can’t you be late for once?
What was different now was that Doug was inside her room. He was touching her. She must have slept too deeply, and he’d decided to jostle her awake. She swatted at him, then a complete recollection of A landed all at once. The precise space the skinner took on the mattress, its weight in her arms, the reedy sound of its breathing. She knew all of this despite A’s absence. She heard Doug’s grunt of effort, too quiet to be trusted.
The show. The crowd. The rage. It was Saturday, not Sunday. She squinted. Doug was stepping away from the bed. What was happening? He balanced A upright while he wound the tarp around it. He lifted its wrapped body into both arms, and it seemed by accident that he caught Liv’s eye as he turned to leave.
She blinked up at him, confused, dimly alarmed, and feeling a great ache in her empty arms. Doug, in reply, did the least expected thing. He didn’t snarl in disgust of how she’d slept alongside it. He didn’t whip Maquahuitl from behind his back. What he did was smile, a smile as gentle as the hands he’d used to remove A.
“A’s light.” He chuckled softly. “Light as a ghost.”
Liv wiped a clump of tangled hair from what felt like a puffy face. She hoisted herself to an elbow. She looked around. The September dawn produced a paltry, sea-green silt that made her room look as if it had been transplanted to the woods out back. Her survey ended on the murky, conjoined form of Doug and A. She’d hoped a night of meditation would calm Doug, and it seemed to have done that.
She scanned the floor and found Mist swaddled in a sweater. The weapon was too far to reach—and what would she do with it if she had it? Perhaps it was some enzyme that had seeped from A’s flesh, but she was so, so, so tired. Last night, all she’d wanted was to turn over A to the authorities. This morning, though, she felt in her exhaustion a relinquishing of those ideals, all so burdensome.
“You said it wasn’t justice,” she whispered. “To…”
“To kill it,” he finished.
“But maybe…” She swallowed, her throat tight and feverish, and those prophetic words of her father wheezed out one last time: “You know what to do.”
“Don’t worry,” Doug whispered. “I’ll take care of it.”
Liv’s body doubled in weight: guilt, grief, acceptance. Last night Doug had confessed that A was the only thing of value he had left, but now he seemed willing to let that thing go. And in doing so, he would save Liv’s life—her potential, her future, everything for which her mom had worked so hard for so long. All Liv had to do to accept this gift was to give in to the weariness, just this once. Not move. Not dispute. Not do anything.
Doug picked his way across the messy floor. Liv opened her mouth but didn’t make a sound. Her mother would hear. Or Liv herself would hear, and the sound would coerce her into making a second sound, then a third, and wasn’t all of it, here at the end, pointless self-destruction? There was a great, unanticipated relief in seeing A slip from her responsibility, a relief she’d felt once before, when her father jumped an electric fence. Letting things go hurt. Keeping them around could hurt even more.
Doug paused at the door and glanced over the top of A’s head.
“I’ll see you soon,” he whispered. “I promise.”