Liv didn’t dare feel sympathy, not this late. “Tell me where he is. I’ll tear this whole field apart, Doug—I swear I will.”
Doug’s eyes shone. “We’re all the alien to someone. That’s all I mean.”
“That’s what I keep saying! Why won’t you listen? A’s not an alien!” Liv moaned. “He’s my dad. He’s Lee. Doug, A is Lee.”
Doug lifted his face until it was again spangled by bursting color.
“What?” he asked softly.
Liv panted, her face wild and open, begging him to understand. Colors radiated over his frozen face. Liv noted his spilled backpack, recognized the book jutting from it, and hurried to it. Tucking the pitchfork under her arm, she snatched up the book. The pages were bloated and stained, the cover snarled and smutched, but she almost sobbed, because it felt like her dad, the wrinkled cover the texture of his skin, the rain-softened pages one of his trademark cardigans.
Over two years since Lee had tried to make her accept his copy of Resurrection Update, she accepted it. The lighting was wild, kaleidoscopic, but intensely bright. She riffled through stiffened pages, squinting past Doug’s marginalia to focus on Lee’s annotations, written during his sickest period. Unlike his mind, Lee’s handwriting was focused, the same block letters he’d used to pen encouragements on English papers. This, Liv thought, was why her dad had wanted her to have the book. The clarity of these poems had cut through his muddled mind, and only here, in these pages, had he been sane.
This wasn’t a book by James Galvin. It was a diary by Lee Fleming.
He’d explained all of this to Liv years ago. Poetry, he’d insisted, is full of secrets. And here were his.
Page 20: “The sky was an occasion / I would never rise to. I had my doubts,” Galvin wrote, to which Lee had added, Doubting my memory—doubting the sky—was it a ship? Was it really? Page 42: “This is for the night your body was neither here nor there,” footnote, I fear I’ve been here all along. What if it’s all a mistake? Page 209: “Dogs howled in pain from a lethal frequency,” footnote, There were other abductees. Other patients? Page 255: “I saw / a drop of blood at the center of everything,” footnote, YES: blood, there were needles, was I in some sort of hospital? Page 252: “The little people behind the scenes are getting ugly,” footnote, Doctors—they were doctors—WAS I REALLY ABDUCTED??? Page 242: “A broken window hangs around my neck,” footnote, Cancer? Do I have cancer? Is that why I was there? Page 101: “I wanted to tell you, the girl,” footnote, How can I make this right to Aggie? Page 123: “You were a perfect stranger, Father,” footnote, How can I make this right to Olivia? Page 150: “Real events don’t have endings, / Only the stories about them do,” footnote, FIND THE PLACE, GO BACK, DO IT FOR THEM.
The italics, in other words, were his. All the things Liv had learned from Carbajal and Faddon, Lee had already figured out, until he closed the book and the truth got jumbled again, though not jumbled enough that he couldn’t lead his hunt right back to Biatalik’s front door. His parting words to Liv ached with an apology he’d only half understood: You have to let me go. I have unfinished business. So he’d gone back, to save his loved ones the grief of his slow demise, or, just maybe, be cured by Faddon’s miracles.
These events, laid bare, sickened Liv. This father she’d adored had made what could only be viewed as a series of horrible choices. He’d taken Major Dawkins’s earnest invitation to reverse his cancer with an experimental procedure out of his family’s view, but the hole he’d left in Liv and Aggie’s life had been worse than cancer—the tumors of losing him had practically killed them. And then, after all that, Lee had crawled back home? Exposing Biatalik might have been his noble cause, but Liv would never know. She’d never, ever know, and knowing that felt like being staked to the ground, forever caught.
Liv let the book fall shut. She looked up at Doug. The fuse was between batches of Roman candles, but she could see his fluttering hair.
“That’s impossible,” he said. “Stop lying!”
The firework erupted, gushing into the sky. It felt as though it had fired inside her; she shot upward, the book tumbling away, the pitchfork rising, the pink and blue smoke seeming to rise from the brain cooking inside her skull. There was no time for debate. She lurched with such speed that Doug stumbled back. Liv plunged through smoke and shouted at the shrinking stalks.
“A! A!” That was wrong, sick, irresponsible. “DAD! DAD! WHERE ARE YOU?”
There came a response, a rustling like corn leaves, but larger. Liv rushed past Doug, ducking as individual sparks cavorted along the pitchfork’s tines. A nebulous shape rested twenty feet away, in the center of the single mown path to the clearing. It was the size of a person, and as she barreled closer, Liv recognized the blue tarp, that fucking blue tarp, bound around a body with loops of duct tape.
“It was supposed to be the end of the Trick!” Doug’s voice cried from a forgotten world. “If you’d done the maze right, it would’ve been your reward!”
Liv reached the bound body and stared down in paralyzed horror. The tape was tight, but her father was alive under there, bucking to get out, a fish tossed to dry land. The tarp had started to tear, and Liv could see a dagger of pale flesh, some part of him that Doug had yet to harvest and catalogue in his jars.
Liv’s knees tremored, ready to drop to a kneel so she could start ripping the tarp, but she locked those knees back into place. There was no sense to any of it. Unwrap him, and then what? Look upon his dying body while his surviving eye took in the sight of the daughter who’d turned against him? Convince herself that doctors could save him? She knew him too well to think he’d want any of that. The true mercy here was to do what Doug hadn’t and release him from everything. It was a mercy he’d been owed since A’s advent, and the dreadful burden of it gathered over Liv like wet cement.
Do it now, before losing the nerve, before Doug intervened. She throttled the pitchfork and lifted it with both hands. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t cry. But she groaned, a eulogy for the kind of person she’d never be again, not after this. She felt a spark land on her back, sharp as a cutlass pushing her toward plank’s end.
“No!” Doug cried. “You’re wrong! Don’t do it!”
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” Liv gasped. “I’m so sorry.”
She drove down the pitchfork. A split second, but it felt like a long journey of winding turns, endless, minuscule decisions of angle and force. None of it worked well. The pitchfork was poorly directed, and the thrust hiccuped with hesitation. But it was four sharp points versus a thin sheet of plastic and soft flesh. It was enough, and she felt in her shoulders the quake of metal against bone, the spasm of shocked muscles tightening around invading spikes. Liv let go of the handle, and the pitchfork stood upright until the body jerked and the tool toppled to the dirt.
Doug’s voice was hoarse.
“You weren’t supposed to do that! What did you do?”
The body convulsed once more, then was still. Liv took a step away. Then another. Another. She glimpsed Doug clutching his head between his hands, still shouting, the main attraction of his future sideshow gone for good. Liv’s hands were numb, making it difficult to take out her phone. She toggled to the dial. Her wobbly finger, though, could not manage 911. She took a breath, swiped to Recents, and brought her thumb down on Bruno’s name. This was easier. She would tell him exactly where she was. He’d call the cops, the hospital, the fire department. He, not Doug, would take care of everything.