“I find I have a lot of free time on my hands,” Eric replied.
“Imagine that.”
“How’s Becky?”
Tom got to his feet, knocking over a stack of books. “Becky is not your business.”
Eric casually gathered up the fallen books and returned them to the table.
“We’re not enemies anymore, Tom,” he said quietly. “I’m a private citizen now. Our ‘friends’ saw to that when they took back all the evidence.”
Tom peered at him warily. “What do you want, Eric?”
“You went from skeptic to believer in a nanosecond,” Eric replied. “I want to know why.”
“Maybe I just saw the light,” Tom answered cagily.
“If you’re talking about the lights in the Mojave, you changed months before that,” Eric said. His gaze bore down upon Tom. “What do you know that you’re not telling me?”
“I might ask you the same question.”
Eric shrugged, giving up any further effort to win Tom over. “Say hello to your sister,” he said, as he turned and walked to a nearby aisle where Wakeman waited for him.
“Well, what do you think?” Wakeman asked.
“Tom Clarke will never give us anything,” Eric told him.
Wakeman smiled. “You know what I love about chaos theory? It’s about systems that can’t resist outside influence. Something happens somewhere, and the system changes. Which means that at the moment, all we can do is watch the skies.”
Eric shook his head determinedly. “You can watch the skies, Chet, but I’m watching Tom Clarke.”
The apartment still felt empty, and curiously lifeless, as if a strange, invisible energy had been drained from it. Lisa peered at the lone-star earring and thought of her father, how he’d seemed strangely resigned at the end, a man who had done his best and had no more to give. She looked at her mother, the red-rimmed eyes, how bereft she was now, more alone that she’d ever been or dreamed of being.
“He’d been… getting weaker since your grandmother died,” Carol said. “I kept asking him to see someone, but he wouldn’t.” She shook her head. “He was so resigned.”
“He understood what was happening to him,” Lisa said, offering what little comfort was possible for her mother.
“That sounds like something he would say.” Carol touched Lisa’s face. “He loved you so much. He was so proud of you.”
Lisa knew that, and never doubted it, so in the months that followed, and even after her mother had found a simple, kindhearted guitar player named Danny and married him, she still felt that her father was with her in some way. By then, she’d begun to wear her grandmother’s earring around her neck. It was the last thing he’d given her, and she found a strange comfort in keeping it so near.
She was wearing it the day she started classes at Morrison Junior High School three years later, the earring still hanging from a chain around her neck.
“Do you know anybody here?”
Lisa glanced at Nina, took in her shocking pink hair and Husker-Du T-shirt. “No,” she admitted.
“Okay,” Nina said brightly. “So, you wanna be friends for life?”
Before Lisa could answer, a waterfall of paper slid from one of Nina’s notebooks. As she helped her gather them up, Lisa noticed that the drawings were quite good, and decided that Nina was not the frivolous fourteen-year-old she appeared to be.
“I don’t show my stuff,” Nina said self-consciously. She smiled. “I worry about…”
“You shouldn’t worry about what people think,” Lisa said decisively. “If someone doesn’t like them, so what?”
They moved toward a van that rested at the nearby curb, a dusty, beat-up VW.
“That’s my stepdad,” Lisa said. “His name’s Danny.”
Nina looked at Lisa knowingly. “An old hippie?”
“He’s a guitar player,” Lisa told her new friend for life. “He lived near us when my father died. I guess my mother just…” She shrugged. “My mom’s at Berkeley, taking a course in alternative nutrition.”
“So it’s just you and… Jerry Garcia?”
Lisa nodded. “For now,” she said.
But it wasn’t all that bad, Lisa told herself that night as she and Danny prepared pork chops, the two of them listening to the television as President Reagan talked about how the people of the earth had a lot in common, and that if the planet were ever attacked by aliens, the whole world would unite.
After dinner, Nina dropped by. They talked a while, and Lisa demonstrated the drum set Danny had bought for her. Nina won Danny over almost instantly, despite her earnest vegetarianism, and the lack of interest in the pork chops he so proudly offered.
Once Nina left, Lisa took her dog Watson on a walk through the trailer park. She could hear the usual sounds of early evening, couples talking, kids playing, the steady drone of televisions and radios. The trailer park was not a bad place, but on these walks in the evening, Lisa thought of her other home, the one she’d had with her father, and how, during the last few years she seemed only to miss him more, and yet to feel that he was not actually gone at all, but remained around her, she still the object of his loving, but now distant, gaze.
Suddenly Watson stopped and began to growl.
“Watson?” Lisa asked. “What is it?”
Watson bolted forward, racing among the trailers and then into the woods, Lisa in full pursuit, rushing through the undergrowth, catching Watson in brief glimpses ahead of her as he darted through the shadows.
“Watson, come back,” Lisa cried.
But the dog continued to dart through the woods, the lights of the trailer park suddenly extinguishing behind her, Lisa running tiredly, growing exhausted, the woods steadily thinning as she neared a clearing where she saw a man sitting on a log, smoking, his crooked body framed by the side of old carnival truck marked TRAVELING ATTRACTIONS.
The carny sat entirely still as Lisa broke into the clearing. Then his eyes shifted over to her, his face wreathed in smoke. “Lisa,” he said. “Today you are a woman.”
Charlie turned onto the darkest stretch of Madison Street. A faint breeze scattered bits of litter across the pavement and rattled the tin signs that lined the deserted street.
He stopped, as if by a hand at his arm, drew in a long breath and steeled himself. If you let this street scare you, he told himself, then you’ll live in fear your whole life long.
He stepped forward resolutely and headed down the street, the breeze at his back, pressing him forward like an invisible hand to where the street made a slow curve toward a bus stop. He could see a man sitting on the bench at the stop, his crooked profile in silhouette beneath the streetlamp, a dusty old carnival truck rooted in the distance, traveling attractions that seemed to have traveled very far.
Charlie stopped, felt a spike of fear, and kept his eyes on the man before him, watching fearfully as he continued to smoke idly, the ghostly curls from his cigarette rising skyward into the darkness like souls released from their long travail.
Lisa wasn’t sure why it had come over her, this sudden interest, only that it grew more intense with each passing day. Now she was reading The Mojave Desert Sightings, by Tom Clarke, a book she’d hardly have noticed before… what? She didn’t know. It had simply come upon her, this need to explore the far-fetched notion that strange beings walked the earth, or hovered above it, looking down, waiting to be discovered.
Carol glanced at Danny worriedly, then across the table to where Lisa continued to read intently, her food untouched before her.
“Are you reading that for an assignment?” Carol asked.
Lisa did not look up from the book. “No.”
“Then why are you reading it?”
Lisa shrugged, her eyes riveted to the page. “I don’t know,” she answered. “I just got curious.”
Danny looked at the book, the photograph of Tom Clarke on the back cover.
“Tom Clarke,” he said to Carol. “That’s Jacob’s brother, right?”
Carol nodded.
“Kind of a fruit-loop.”
Lisa tensed. “I’ll be in my room,” she said.
In her room, she was not sure why she’d suddenly felt so hostile to Danny, or so defensive about Tom Clarke. After all, Danny had always been good to her, and she hardly knew Tom Clarke. And yet, she’d bristled visibly when Danny had made light of Tom. It was almost like he’d insulted her as well, called her a fruit-loop, too.
Strange, she thought, as she sat down on her bed, reading intently once again, her eyes fixed on the page, her mind so focused on the account of the Mojave sightings that she barely noticed when her mother stepped into the room.
“What’s going on, Lisa?” Carol asked.
“Nothing,” Lisa answered. She could see that her mother wasn’t buying it. “I’m fine,” she added reassuringly. “Really.”
Carol sat down on the bed beside her. “Your uncle Tom has a lot of weird ideas, Lisa.” She glanced at the book apprehensively, as if it were a loaded gun. “You’re not starting to… have the same ideas, are you?”
“What if I am?” Lisa replied, a touch of defiance edging into her voice.
“Lisa,” Carol said softly, “you come from a… special family. Your father had an amazing mind. He could look at things and figure them out. With people too. He could see things other people couldn’t see.” She touched Lisa’s hand. “Honey, your life is changing because you’re growing up. You’re not being abducted by a spaceship, you’re being taken into adulthood.” She released a short, awkward laugh. “Of the two, I’d say that’s far and away the scarier proposition.”
Lisa listened as her mother continued, but found her mind continually drawn back to the Mojave sightings, her uncle’s book, so that by the time Carol left her room, she had made up her mind to contact him.