Vail started talking.
He spoke of waking as a child, of alien figures standing over him, of bright lights. Of being unable to move. He spoke of how it felt when he dropped off to sleep, wondering if tonight it would happen, if tonight they would change their minds and finally take him with them.
I lay my head back down on the arm of the sofa as he spoke, watching the TV unseeing as Vail finally talked,talked, on and on. I blinked hard and thought that Ben hadn’t been the only helpless little boy to live in this house. But Vail hadn’t crawled into anyone’s bed for comfort. He’d stayed in his own bed, alone.
He talked about the night the figure had spoken to him, the only time it had said words. Two words:Wake up.
“That happened right before Ben came,” he said, his voice drifting and dreamy. He was still staring at the ceiling. “He wasn’t born yet. But he knew about it. The lights, everything. He just knew. He kept them away. Until they took him instead of me.”
I let my thoughts circle lazily, as if they were in a warm tumble dryer on a slow setting. The lights. The words. Ben. On TV, a commercial for Nair was on. Nair was a cream you put on your legs—or wherever—and when you wiped it off, your hair came with it. It smelled putrid. Women in short shorts were showing off their smooth legs, happy as could be. I had auditioned for a handful of razor ads, but though my legs were good, they weren’t quite good enough. For a Nair commercial, your calves had to be extremely narrow, because the camera would make them look thicker. My agency told me it was best to “lead with my hair,” as they put it. My hair was always a shoo-in, and although you could starve yourself into thin air, there was absolutely nothing you could do about wrongly shaped legs.
For a second, I stood outside my own life in shocked dismay. My little brother was dead, my big brother had lived with nightmares his entire childhood just like I had, my parents were dead, and my big sister was in the attic right now, looking at our little brother’s toys and grieving. And I was supposed tocareabout how narrow my calves were. In my world, that was supposed to matter so much that I hollowed myself out with worry, that I wished for a different body so that more people would buy disgusting cream to wipe their hair off. If I was lucky—lucky—the legacy I’d leave behind in my life, the proof of my existence after the volcano erupted, would be Nair.
Wake up,I thought.
Vail had gone quiet, and I knew he wasn’t waiting for me to speak. He didn’t need my approval or my acceptance. He didn’t even need proof that I’d heard every word he said. He already knew.
“It was water,” I said. “For me. It was always water.”
Vail’s eyebrows twitched down and his gaze narrowed on the ceiling. “Water?”
“I wake up and it’s everywhere.” My throat was thick. I had never told anyone this before. “It’s filling the room, rising. My bed is anisland. It’s dark water, fetid. Cold. I wake up trapped. I sit up against the headboard and hug my knees. I know I can’t wade through it, can’t swim, because if I try, it will drag me down.”
My brother lifted his head and fixed his gaze on me. In his expression was growing alarm.
I felt strangely calm, talking about this. I knew I had gone into some kind of spiral after going into the attic, that I’d stopped making very much sense. I remembered feeling feverish, except that the fever was pulsing in my temples and the back of my head. It made my stomach turn and acid burn in my chest. But I felt none of that now. The fever had burned away.
“The water used to come at night,” I said as Vail listened. “It was a dream, but it wasn’t a dream. I think you know exactly what I mean. I’d wake up to the sound of the water, the smell. I’d pull my knees up and sit, waiting. Not moving. Because going into the water was dangerous, but also if I moved, something would notice me. Something would know I was there.”
Vail waited, silent. On TV, the woman had confessed, and Matlock was triumphant. Justice was served.
“I would wait for the water to go down,” I said, “and most times it would. But sometimes—sometimes it would keep rising, and then it would wash over, and I couldn’t escape.” I wiped an icy hand over my face. “That’s what happened the other night. Ben came, and he was in bed with me, and it was—I can’t describe it. I was so happy. And then the water came back.”
My brother’s face was stark with grief, with understanding. We looked at each other for a long time, saying everything and nothing.
“I should have protected you,” he said, and the words broke my heart.
“You couldn’t have,” I said. “There was nothing you could do. Just like there was nothing I could do for you. Like there’s nothing either of us can do for Violet.”
He inhaled through his nose, then let out his breath. His gaze flicked to the words on the wall. “The lights,” he said. “The water. They’re connected. They have to be.”
I nodded. “They have to be.”
His expression went unfocused, thinking, and I knew my big brother would figure it out, just like I knew that the sun would rise in the morning and that I would never go back to modeling. “I think the timeline is the key,” he said, mostly to himself.
“Vail,” I said.
“The timeline isn’t what we think it is,” Vail said. “Not at all. It never has been.”
“Vail.”
He looked at me. “What?”
“It wasn’t aliens that you saw the other night,” I said. I bit my lip, then plunged on, hoping he was ready to hear it. “It wasn’t ever aliens, what you saw back then. Maybe that theory—it was never right. What you saw was something else.”
My brother’s response to hearing that his life’s work to this point was an illusion, a pointless waste of time, was to slowly give one of his scowls and say, “Yeah.”
26
