The Spaceship Next Door (12 page)

He picked up the folder marked ‘zombie’. This was the interview with the man everyone called Loony Larry. Larry wasn’t even his name—he was born Vincent Allen—but everyone called him Larry, and that was how he introduced himself. He didn’t mind being called Loony, either. He seemed to think it was a compliment.

Larry had a theory that incorporated a flute, the migratory pattern of Monarch butterflies, and something about Sauron from
Lord of the Rings
. There was no sense to be made of any of it—even after Larry showed them the flute as if that would help—but the conclusion was an actual zombie apocalypse.

When Ed asked him when this was going to be happening, in his considered opinion, Larry said, “soon,” and then strongly indicated that it might already be happening.

Larry was actually the most cogent of the crazies in the crowd. A woman named Margo theorized that the reason nobody could touch the ship was that it wasn’t there at all. It was actually a piece of negative space in the shape of a ship, and to get too close was to fall through to another universe, “like into a cup of coffee,” she explained not-at-all-helpfully. A man named Zeno spoke for an hour about spiders and never explained how they had anything to do with the spaceship. He didn’t seem to know why he was there.

Ed came into this worried that one of them had managed to detect the same thing the scientists had. Two weeks later he would have been overjoyed to hear just one mention of Cherenkov radiation. It would have been bad news, but it also would have meant at least one of those people had found something real.

He glanced back out the window to see how the basketball game was going.

Annie was enthusiastic about coming back to the base and letting him hide with his documents while she visited with the soldiers. He was probably doing something wrong by leaving her unsupervised. That was provided the definition of
unsupervised
included leaving her in the charge of a corporal named Corning, who was currently at the basketball court shirtless. Ed wasn’t the best reader of people in the world, but he understood just fine that Annie wanted Ed gone once she saw Sam Corning without his shirt.

It was just as well. Better she see Corporal Corning without his shirt than any of the confidential stuff on his desk. Annoyingly, he had a feeling if she
could
see it, she’d have an insight or two that would be helpful. She had a talent for that.

And, she was gone. He was looking at the soldiers playing their game and not at the bleachers. She wasn’t there.

He jumped to his feet and ran to the door, jerked it open, and nearly ran her over.

She stumbled into the room.

“Jesus, Ed, where are you going?”

“To look for you.”

“I’m right here.”

“I see that now. I’m—”

“Forget it. We have to go.” She was holding her cell phone in her hand. She looked terrified, and—for perhaps the first time since they met—like a young girl.

“Is something wrong?”

“My mom. Please.”

T
he closest thing
to a hospital in Sorrow Falls was a walk-in clinic on Main. The clinic didn’t have overnight services, or anything like an ambulance bay, and was really established primarily to deal with accidents happening to or caused by tourists.

When someone needed a real hospital, they ended up at one of two such facilities, both located within thirty miles. Which one a person ended up at depended upon where they were picked up by the ambulance, based on an invisible demarcation line running through the middle of the town, southwest-to-northeast. People who found themselves in unexpected emergencies while in the southeast half of the town usually ended up at Saint Mary’s in Carrel, which was two towns over. The northwest half—which had the army base, an alien spaceship, Annie’s house and a lot of farms—was supported by Harbridge Memorial, which was one or two wrong turns away from the Vermont border.

Ambulance services were more diverse, and closer, but not in all cases 100% devoted to emergency support. Annie knew this, but Ed was a little alarmed to find a hearse in front of the house when they got there.

They were already inside, and the door was open. Annie jumped out of the car before Ed even parked it, and ran up the steps.

“Oh hello, dear!” her mother greeted as soon as Annie breached the living room.

She was in her chair with an oxygen tube in her nose. A paramedic—his name was Lee, Annie knew his younger sister Zoe from school—was checking her blood pressure. His partner, a woman Annie didn’t know, was sorting through her mother’s pharmacopeia with a blue-gloved hand.

“What happened?” Annie asked. It wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular, just whoever felt like they could provide the best answer.

“It’s nothing!” her mother said.

“It wasn’t nothing, Carol, you sent a 9-1-1.”

Getting the full attention Mrs. Carol Collins was often a challenge, whether one was a paramedic trying to assess her stability or her daughter trying to get a straight answer. Her daughter had one trick that almost always worked, and that was calling her by her first name.

“All right, I had a thing, but I’m okay now.”

“What sort of thing?”

“Nothing, I panicked is all. I’m actually fine. I’m sorry I worried you.”

Annie turned to the female paramedic.

“What kind of thing?”

“Difficulty breathing was the call,” the paramedic said.

“Is she out of danger?” Annie asked.

“Oh, I’m fine now.”

Annie ignored her mother, the woman paramedic silently deferred to Lee, and nobody said anything else for a few seconds because he had a stethoscope plugged into his ears and was busy jotting down notes.

“Not sure,” he said, on realizing he was expected to answer. “But we’re going to need to bring her in. You know how this goes.”

Annie did. So did her mother.

“It’s nothing!” she said.

“Shut up, Carol, they’re taking you to Harbridge and you’re going to be nice about it,” Annie said.

“But—”

“Be nice!”

“Fine.”

Carol threw her hands in the air in mock surrender.

Ed was standing at the door, looking unsure about whether or not he should even be in the room for this.

“Hey, I could use a lift to the hospital, if you’re not doing anything,” Annie said. “I hate to ask, but I have a thing about riding in ambulances and—”

“Of course.”

“
D
oes this happen a lot
?” Ed asked, en route. The flashers from the ambulance lit up the evening, which reminded Annie a little bit of the spaceship, even though the ship glowed white on entry, while the dome lights were red.

“No,” Annie said. “Well, once or twice. Maybe four times. Not a lot. Last time was in winter. That sucked. Took the ambulance forever to get to us, even. I was home for that one.”

“But she was okay?”

“On top of everything else she has going on, she’s prone to panic attacks. I guess that’s what they are. Not like she doesn’t have a
reason
to panic. I think the weed’s in part to keep her from freaking out. She says it’s for pain, and that’s true, but it keeps her moods stable too. So, but last time, they sent her home with the number for a psychiatrist she never called, and she didn’t tell
me
what the diagnosis was, but I’m guessing it was something more in her head than her body.”

“Well, that’s good. Not
good
. You know what I mean.”

“Yeah. They’ll take her in and make sure someone with malpractice insurance looks at her before deciding it was nothing. The paramedics sure aren’t going to make that call. But they know. Look, they aren’t even speeding.”

Annie remembered when old Rooney Kazmarek passed. He had an apartment above Kazmarek Hardware, right up Main from the Diner. She saw them loading him in the back, then heading down the road. They drove slowly then, too, but that was because Rooney was already dead of a heart attack. There wasn’t any rush.

Annie shivered, and shook the memory free. Her mother was fine. They were driving the speed limit because Carol was in the back telling them to.

“Is there… anyone else you need to call?” Ed asked. He was asking a different question.

“I’ll call dad if I have to. You know, if it’s anything. It’s
not
. Same thing happened last time; she just freaked out and couldn’t breathe. It was scary.”

“Your father lives around here?”

Annie laughed.

“Sure, when he’s in town. That’s just not all that often. It’s his job. He works for Hollis.”

“The paper mill?”

“Yes, that Hollis. They used to use trees from New Hampshire and Maine to make the paper. Someone up there would cut down the trees and then roll them into the river and float them down. On this end there’d be guys whose whole day was spent on the riverbanks, catching logs before they hit the falls. Cool job.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

“Oh, wildly dangerous. They have these giant hooks on the wall down at the mill. I’ll show them to you, you’ll want to talk to the people there anyway, right?”

“I’ve been trying to get a meeting with Desmond Hollis since I got into town, actually.”

“Seriously? You should have asked, I can get you in.”

Ed laughed.

“Right, I should have figured you’d have a way into a room with the richest man in town.”

“I think he’s actually third-richest now, but yeah, I can get you in with Desmond. What was I talking about?”

“The hooks on the wall.”

“Right. They’re mounted right above one of those ‘it’s been X days since the last accident’ safety signs, because someone down there has a sense of humor. Anyway, my dad’s the one fetching the logs now, but not from the river. The lumber comes in from Canada, and on trucks. Safer, not as good for the environment, probably.”

“So he drives a rig.”

“Kind of. He supervises the driving of rigs. Trucks come through all the time, but he’s not behind the wheel more than once every six months or so. He’ll come down for vacations and whatnot… anyway. He’s around, just not
very
around.”

Annie didn’t feel a need for further clarification. It should have been obvious that her parents were separated. Dad effectively lived in Canada. He kept an apartment there, and the last she heard he had a girlfriend staying with him in that apartment. He and Carol weren’t divorced in part to keep her on his health insurance, a decision reached shortly after her cancer diagnosis and about six months before they formalized their separation by notifying their only child.

He still kept a room in their house, and stayed in that room when he was in town, but that was about all.

Ed seemed to get all this without it being explained, and he looked like he wanted to share a story about his life or something, which is what adults did when they talked to kids about serious things. She’d been getting a range of
things will get better
life lessons stories from adults since Carol was diagnosed, and Annie hated every one of them because they always ended up being a lot more self-serving than helpful. Yes, she knew things would get better, and yes, she was coping. She coped by keeping incredibly busy, and being positive, and getting so involved in the town the military warned its soldiers about her. She didn’t need to know someone else’s tragic backstory to figure out how to do that.

Annie was glad, then, that Ed opted not to go that route. Perhaps it was the confused not-divorced status of her family. Or maybe he just realized that drawing a comparison to his upbringing in whatever-land U.S.A. wasn’t going to match up well with the girl who was raising herself with a UFO for a neighbor.

“Hey, thanks for doing this,” Annie said. “I could have followed in the family car, probably, but I haven’t had a lot of practice and this didn’t seem like the best time to work on it.”

“No, I imagine it isn’t. Don’t worry about it.”

The ambulance eventually pulled up to a dock at a building that looked only nominally hospital-like. Annie was mostly used to it, but the first time she’d been to Harbridge Memorial she asked the paramedic (she’d ridden in the ambulance that time) why they were stopping at a warehouse.

“Looks like we’re here,” Ed said. He rolled the car past the dock and into one of the ‘Emergency Room Only’ spots. “I can stick around, if you need me to.”

Annie hadn’t thought past getting to the hospital, but now that she had and he was asking, she realized she should have given the family car a more thorough consideration.

“It may be a couple of hours.”

“That’s okay. Do they have coffee in there?”

“It’s something that looks like coffee. I can’t attest to the taste.”

They were taking her mother out of the back of the ambulance/hearse. Carol was sitting up and her mouth was going, so she was probably complaining about having to leave home. That was a good sign, Annie decided. The day Carol stopped fighting was going to be a rough day for everyone.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Ed said. Probably referencing the coffee and not Carol, though both worked. “Doesn’t seem right to leave.”

T
he emergency room
of Harbridge Memorial was unreasonably small for a hospital servicing such a large geographic area. There were only about fifteen temporary beds, separated by curtains on rollers attached to the drop ceiling. It wasn’t a great place to spend a lot of time when one was healthy, and especially not when one was a healthy sixteen years. Consequently, while waiting for the barrage of preliminary tests to begin producing results, Annie did a lot of walking around, drifting between the beds and the waiting area where Ed was taste-testing the coffee and reading magazines about the latest Christmas movies from last season.

Carol mostly slept, which was another good sign. When she was really worried about something, she didn’t sleep; she talked, and when she didn’t talk she watched old movies.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Annie asked Ed. They were alone in the waiting room, it was approaching Midnight, and there wasn’t anyone else there. Annie had counted all the ceiling tiles, twice, and discovered every pattern irregularity in the tile floor. There was nothing left to do but sleep, and she didn’t want to do that.