Page 24 of Strange Lights

The little voice creates an echo chamber out of Calvin’s words, rattling around concepts that unsettle me. Eldi might be a little different. But it doesn’t matter. She’s doing fine, quietly living life with me.

“Why now? Eldi has been with me for years. If she is an alien, she’s been happily living on this planet for the last seven years, at a minimum.”

“Maybe she was the first sent here, a scout.”

Visitors, travelers from so far.

Great, first Calvin changes his tune, and now even the voice in my head is a conspiracy theorist.

“For what? An invasion? Does she look like she has grand schemes of colonization?” I scoff, and gesture at Eldi, who is drawing the constellation Orion amid other scribbles with crayons on her kids’ menu.

“No, of course not. I’m not saying Eldi is up to anything nefarious. But”⁠—he nods at Eldi’s artwork⁠—“I don’t think we should ignore the connection either.”

I recognize the shapes amid the stars when I look closer. Not scribbles after all, but the same shapes carved into carpets and cornfields. The same shapes shared across the internet. I’ve read a dozen different analyses by amateurs and professionals, code breakers, and linguists, and no one has figured out the message yet.

“Eldi, what does this mean?” I say, snatching the paper up to look at it more closely.

Eldi scowls at the interruption. “Quack. Duck.”

“Truly remarkable,” I say sarcastically.

“Duck. Quack,” Eldi says with emphasis, hand outstretched for her paper.

“Maybe she lost her way and got stuck here. Maybe someone is looking for her. Maybe she had engine problems, I don’t know. That’s the point. We owe it to her to find out.” He’s speaking quietly, eyes on our surroundings.

“Quack, duck, quack, duck, quack!” Eldi is nearly shouting now, but I don’t care to shush her. The restaurant is quiet; there are not many people around to overhear. It’s all toddler babble anyway.

“Intergalactic traveler, huh?” I scoff. “She barely even speaks, and you think she flew a spaceship here?” I immediately want to swallow those ugly words back down, but it’s too late.

“Fuck. Duck. Quack,” Eldi snaps again, her eyes narrowing at me as she snatches her paper back from my hands and darts under the table to crawl up into Calvin’s lap instead.

“Eldi, I didn’t mean it that way⁠—”

She hums loudly over me, as if she can’t hear me. The tune is from a morbid little nursery rhyme. Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children are gone.

My blood curdles. I don’t know how she knows that tune. She can’t know what hearing it does to me.

“Reggie,” Calvin says. I hate his disappointed, chastising tone.

To my horror, there’s a lump forming in my throat. “I’ve had enough food,” I declare, my voice cracking around the syllables. Eldi looks up at me as I dig in my pockets for cash and toss it on the table. “I’ll meet you in the Winnebago,” I tell Eldi without meeting her gaze. “Unless you want to ride in the Airstream with Calvin.”

Eldi mutters indistinguishable curses under her breath, but scrambles out of Calvin’s lap and stalks toward the door.

Calvin lets out a sigh and follows her.

At this point, camping remotely is a given. When you’re trying to keep off everyone’s radar a new werewolf, a slew of sentient vacuums determined to carve nightly crop circles into any available foliage, and a toddler Chupacabra, the crowded KOA tends not to be the best choice. We’re in a dispersed camping spot in the salt flats in Utah, far enough from towns that Eldi can go out hunting on her own. She’s got a fondness for the challenge of hunting predators if there are no goats available and there are cougars about.

The late-afternoon sun is shining through the Winnebago windows, and Eldi still hasn’t forgiven me for the things I said at lunch. She sits across from me at the table, noisily chewing on one of Goat’s ears, resolutely refusing to look up from her tablet. I try to catch up on emails, though it’s impossible to concentrate given the guilt churning in my stomach, plus the distraction that is Dave as he putters about the kitchen, digging through the cabinets and tossing things around. His clicking and whirring sound angry, and he pauses his destruction every few minutes to zoom frantically across the floor, running over my toes in a way that feels personal. I could swear he’s picking up on Eldi’s mood.

I can’t take it anymore. I’ll apologize. I can be an adult about this. But an apology is not what leaves my mouth.

“Do you want to leave?” I finally blurt out, looking up from my computer at Eldi. “Is that what’s happening with all the UFOs and crop circles? Is someone coming here for you?”

Eldi’s eyes momentarily flick up from her tablet.

“No. All alone,” she mutters before returning her gaze to her tablet.

Alone, alone, alone. The voice in my head echoes a melancholy refrain. I know alone. “You aren’t alone. You have me. You’d miss me, if you left?” I ask. Pathetic. I’m not being an adult about this at all. “I’d miss you,” I croak.