“Smart girl,” Eric said proudly. He turned to Julie. “I don’t think it’s too sudden at all.”
Jesse sat alone, reading, but hardly noticing what he read as his mind returned to something that had happened a few days before. It had been a night like this, clear and crisp. A terrible restlessness had seized him, something invisible urging him from his bed. He’d got-ten up, leaving Amelia asleep in their bed, dressed and gone for a drive, down the state highway, where he’d finally ended up near the accident site of a few days before, standing in a wheat field as the wind rippled through the tall green blades. He’d thought himself alone in the field, then a farmer had shown up, shotgun in hand, recognized him as the man who’d pulled his son from a sweep augur the year before, and lowered the gun. The farmer’s question sounded in Jesse’s mind, You come to look at my glow-in-the-dark field?
Minutes later, Jesse had seen the field for himself, a circle burned out of it, the farmer saying directly what Jesse had thought at the time, Looks like a flying saucer, don’t it?
It did, yes, and now, as Jesse glanced up from his book, the night clear and crisp beyond the house, he felt oddly ready for what he saw: a light, bright and searing, reflected in the mirror above the fireplace.
He drew in a deep breath. They were coming for him, and he knew it. They were coming for him again, but this time it was going to be different. He got to his feet. This time he was going to fight them.
He knocked over a table as he rushed out of the house and into the street. The light was huge now, and steadily lowering, its bright glow intensifying as it descended.
“What do you want?” Jesse cried. “Leave me alone!”
“Dad?”
Jesse wheeled around to see his son standing a short distance away, his small hand lifted toward him imploringly. Amelia stood beside Charlie, a bag of groceries in her arms, the headlights of her car illuminating the scene.“Come back into the house, Dad,” Charlie said.
Jesse nodded, his shoulders slumped, as if beneath the accusatory looks he saw in his neighbors’ eyes.
Later that night, as he lay in bed with Amelia, he knew that the time had come, and so he told her everything, how they’d rescued him from the temple in Vietnam, how he’d thought of them as his dark guardian angels, and put himself in danger time and again to see if they would save him, the fact that they always had. But even all this was not enough. Everything had to come out, and so he went on, talking without restraint, the story pouring out of him in a flood of revelation, the way he’d been “taken” from a bomb shelter, the people who were after him, not aliens this time, but military people, how he’d assumed a false name and joined the Army in order to conceal himself. At last, he showed her the red imprint of the hand on his chest, though it was clear she saw only a rash.
“Maybe it’s… all in your mind, Jesse,” Amelia said cautiously.
“You don’t see a hand?” Jesse asked.
She touched him softly. “We’ve been through a lot,” she said. “And we’ll get through this. But, please, see someone, Jesse. I want you to see someone.”
He shook his head. “They’d just tell me I have a tumor. My father died of one. There is something in my head, Amelia, but it’s not a tumor. It’s something they put there. Something that tells them about me.”
Amelia stroked his brow, a nurse again, only this time to a husband who was going mad. “Jesse, listen to yourself. You’ve got to see someone. If you won’t do it for me, do it for Charlie.”
He thought of Charlie, how much he wanted to stay alive and healthy and watch his son grow up. “All right,” he said. “I will.”
He met Dr. Findlay the next day, went through every test the doctor suggested, then returned for the results. The doctor’s diagnosis did not surprise him.
“The tumor is very small,” Dr. Findlay said. “There’s no sign of fluid buildup… but still, it could explain your recent behavior.”
Jesse knew that it was not a tumor, but what was the point of saying so.
Dr. Findlay handed him a small card with a name and address written on it. “Dr. Franklin Traub. He’s the best in the country.”
Jesse took the card. He knew that Dr. Traub would recommend surgery, and that during the course of that surgery, he would surely die as his father had, bearing an unbearable secret to the grave. For a moment, that death seemed sweet, a way of escaping… and allowing his family to escape.
Jacob and Becky watched the television screen where Tom appeared, sitting in a chair like a real celebrity, talking to the host, explaining his certainty that people were being abducted by aliens, even displaying a picture of the aliens themselves, creatures he estimated as being about four feet tall with pear-shaped heads, almond-shaped eyes, elongated arms, and long, extra-jointed fingers.
“Any minute he’ll do a card trick,” Jacob said.
Becky looked at him somberly. “I always knew, Jake. I always did. But I never thought that contactor Mom was building in the garage was going to get… your father’s attention.”
Jacob concentrated on the screen. Tom was now declaring that although he’d once been the nation’s foremost debunker of alien abductions, he had recently come to accept such stories as entirely true, a change he attributed to a “personal experience” he was not “at liberty” to discuss.
Jacob shook his head. No one would believe him, he thought. No one in the world save a few “crackpots” who were actually looking for the proof. And the price to Tom would be enormous. He would be ridiculed ceaselessly, caricatured and lampooned, the butt of a thousand cruel jokes. Ordinary people would cross the street in order to avoid him.
Jacob glanced across the room to where Carol sat with Lisa in her arms, reading to her quietly. It was a frail world, he knew, one he could blast into a thousand pieces with a single word.
He glanced back at the television. The audience was laughing.
Not me, he thought, not me.
Jesse and Amelia took their seats in Dr. Traub’s wood-paneled office and waited for the test results.
The doctor remained behind his desk, his hand on a slender folder.
“You were right,” he said to Jesse. “That thing in your brain is not a tumor.”
Jesse could hardly believe that Dr. Traub had actually confirmed what he’d always known, but never expected anyone to believe, that the thing in his brain had not been formed by his body, not a malignancy of flesh… but of intent.
“It’s very small,” Traub went on. “It looks metallic.” This last remark seemed almost physically to yank Traub forward in his seat. “Where did you grow up?” he asked.
“ Illinois.”
“Any exposure to chemicals?”
“Heroin,” Jesse admitted.
“And you say your father had a similar tumor?”
“Not similar.”
“No?”
“Identical.”
“I see.” Dr. Traub smiled reassuringly. “Well, for the record, we see such deposits occasionally in people who work with unusual chemicals,” he explained. “They’re usually made up of some kind of foreign matter that got swept into a little pile because your body couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it.” He clasped his hands together. “The important thing is that we can treat it without surgery. We can use localized ultrasound therapy to break it up. Once that’s happened, you’ll pass it in a matter of days.”
Jesse glanced at Amelia, then back to Dr. Traub. “No surgery?” he asked with great relief.