“That’s really exiting, guys,” she said with a little smile. “You’ll let me know, right?”
“Of course!” Mr. Shoeman clapped her on the shoulder while Dobbs mostly blushed. “Maybe soon the whole world will know!”
“Fingers crossed!” Annie said.
IT WAS difficult to muster up the kind of enthusiasm they were looking for from her. Not so long ago, every burp, tweet, and shrug ostensibly discovered by the members of the trailer park collective was a landmark event. Annie would hear about it and tell her friends and her mom, often out of breath and wide-eyed with the anticipation of a thing to come.
The thing never came, though, because the ship never moved.
There were only two things that could be easily verified from the distance of the roof city: the ship still existed; it was warm enough that snow melted off of it.
The second thing was extremely interesting, but it seemed like most times the people in the campers focused on the first thing, since that was why they were there in the first place. An alien spacecraft had landed in Massachusetts, and this was something to bear witness to.
The problem appeared to be that nobody knew what to do after having borne witness, aside from continuing to do so routinely.
When the ship first landed Annie couldn’t get enough of the entire experience. Excited people showed up every day with weird equipment and wild theories and none of them cared who they told about it: a reporter from NBC or an inquisitive thirteen-year old girl, it was all the same to most of them. Listen to us, they said, over and over, as often as possible to as many people as would stop to hear.
There was a breathlessness to the whole thing, as surely any minute something would happen, and the world lost its collective mind just thinking about the possibilities. It was crazy and intoxicating, and Annie loved the whole thing.
She also believed a lot of what she was told. At thirteen, the idea that adults could be thoroughly and completely wrong-headed about anything was just a growing notion. So if Derinda Lake wanted to tell her the aliens had burrowed from underneath the ship and walked among them, Annie was inclined to believe her, even if it contradicted Carter Kent’s calm assertion that the machine was clearly an unmanned probe presaging the arrival of a space fleet. Likewise, Loonie Larry and his zombie theory didn’t fit the first two theories—or any other sane theory—but she was willing to take him seriously too, for a little while.
Dobbs and Mr. Shoeman didn’t have a strong theory, or not one they were willing to share. They were more interested in collecting evidence first and then developing a conclusion.
That was all fine, except there was no evidence to collect, and every day that passed without real evidence was a day that made Mr. Shoeman and Dobbs seem that much more desperate, and more like everyone else out there in the camper rooftop city. They were all as friendly as ever, and she still liked talking to them, but she was approaching a point where her interactions were more out of pity than interest. One day she was going to grow up and leave Sorrow Falls. The only way any of them—Dobbs and Mr. Shoeman or, really anyone else in the campers—were going anywhere was if the ship did something, and Annie was growing convinced that this would never happen.
ANNIE CLIMBED down from the ladder, hoping the display of modest enthusiasm she’d given was sufficient. It was unfortunate that once the camera crews and print reporters stopped coming around on a weekly basis, the only people who would still listen were people like Annie, which meant in a weird way that they needed her affirmation.
Or something.
It was a dynamic she didn’t really understand. Mr. Shoeman was retired, his wife died a decade earlier, and if he had children and grandchildren, he didn’t talk about them. (His relationship to Dobbs was a complete mystery. They weren’t related by blood and that was all she knew.) It was possible he had adopted her in his own way.
She already had a grandfather. Her mom’s dad. He died when she was seven, and she only remembered seeing him one time. He spent ten minutes trying to make her laugh and impressing her by making it look like his thumb was detachable. The smile on his face when he performed this trick was a little like what Art Shoeman did when he had something new to tell Annie. She didn’t quite know how to tell him she knew his thumb wasn’t really coming off, especially when he seemed to believe it was.
She walked the bike back across the street through the slow-moving traffic of perpetual rubberneckers.
“Morning, Annie,” one of the soldiers said with a smile and a wave.
“Morning, corporal,” she said back, wheeling the bike over to him.
His name was Sam Corning. He was a twenty-four year old six foot four square jawed soldier with baby blue eyes and a smile that never went away even when he stopped smiling.
Annie was going to run away with him one day, to live on a ranch in the hills of Virginia, and make babies and fresh vegetables. That he didn’t know any of this had surprisingly little impact on her plans.
“You can call me Sam, you know that.”
“What, out here in the open? People will talk.”
Annie learned to flirt by watching old black-and-white movies. She couldn’t tell yet if she was any good at it.
He laughed. “It’s corporal if you need rescuing or something, otherwise Sam is just fine. We’ve been through this.”
Sam Corning was the only soldier she’d met from the base that didn’t like to be reminded he happened to be a soldier. Annie was pretty sure that meant something, but didn’t know what.
“How’s things? Quiet?”
“As always. Saw a bug earlier; pretty sure I never saw one like it before. Probably not an alien.”
“Probably not.”
“Killed it anyway, just in case.”
“With the gun?”
Sam had an M16A2 on his shoulder, a Beretta M9 handgun on his hip, and a Bowie knife on his belt. She knew this not because of any particular fascination with guns—she had no love for them—but because he’d given her a walkthrough of his weaponry in a prior conversation.
“I used my boot. Anything exciting going on over there?”
He nodded toward Dobbs.
“I’m afraid that’s classified, Corporal Corning. How about here?”
“Equally classified. Although rumor has it someone will be going through the gate in another hour or two. My orders are to let them in and close the gate behind them.”
“Truly, this is a challenging job.”
“You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.”
Annie laughed. She quoted A Few Good Men to him one time and he never quite got over it.
“So who is it?”
“Classified.”
“The president? THE PRESIDENT IS COMING?”
“No, stop shouting.”
She turned to the trailers. “HEY, EVERYONE!”
“Stop!”
“So who’s coming?” she asked, turning back. “Spill.”
“Some journalist. Doing a retrospective. Time magazine or… one of them, I forget.”
“Oooh, that’s more exciting than the president.”
“Really? To whom?”
“Pretty much everyone.”
By the third year of the spaceship occupation, everyone in town had either met the president or met someone whose job it was to keep them from meeting the president, at least two or three times. Sorrow Falls also had its share of members of congress and visiting heads of state, plus a variety of religious dignitaries. It was an understatement to say the community was jaded when it came to famous people.
On the other hand, a journalist was someone who would stop and talk to the trailer city collective. That was much more important than any president.