I LET MYSELF into the house and dragged my suitcases in behind me. The living room was exactly the same as the last time I was home—same orange, seventies shag carpeting, same fifteen-year-old TV set sitting in a wooden cabinet. The windows looked out over the yard and the trees beyond, but it was too dark out to see anything through them.
I walked through the house, flipping on lights as I went, and finally reached my room. It had been mostly untouched since I was twelve years old, and every summer that I came back to it, I was further from the version of myself that used to live in it full-time. This room had the same floral wallpaper that was put up when I was five, while my room in Chicago had recently been painted a dark blue gray. Here, the back of the door was papered with posters of Zac Efron and the cast of High School Musical; there, my room was covered with two large corkboards that held my calendars, assignment information, and articles I liked. Here, the small secondhand desk had been painted all white and was still covered in bits of glue and glitter; there, my sleek IKEA desk usually held only my laptop, some pens, and a stack of female war-correspondent biographies that my mom had given to me for Christmas.
I quickly peeked into Dad’s room—just in case—but there was no one there. His bed was unmade and his curtains were pulled shut. His office was a mess, but that wasn’t anything new. The desk was covered in papers, the walls lined with corkboards chock-full of ideas for stories. I skimmed them—prehistoric lizard spotted in Daytona. Crop triangles = the new crop circles?—and shook my head.
Framed against one wall was the very first article Dad had ever written for Strange World. Published when I was only a year old, it was about the supposed alien landing in Bone Lake. The beginning of Dad’s obsession with the Visitors. That year, a meteorite had landed in the woods outside of town. It was slightly larger than most meteorites, so it drew some attention from the local and state news, and even brought some scientists to town to check it out. But it was just your garden-variety—or rather space-variety—hunk of rock, and the story quickly faded away.
For everyone except my dad, that is, who claimed he’d noticed some “strange occurrences” in town that year and thought they might be connected to the meteorite crash. So he drafted up a story about the alien “Visitors” who’d come down with the space rock and who were now living in the woods outside of his hometown, and he sold it on spec to the fledgling Strange World. The piece hit big, putting the paper on the map and ensuring Dad would have an income forever—or at least as long as there was a section of the tabloid-reading public that cared more about batboy sightings than Bachelorette proposals.
As a kid, I thought my dad’s article on the Visitors was a brave piece of genius; everyone in town rolled their eyes and huffed about the added attention Dad had brought to Bone Lake (this time from wild-eyed tabloid junkies rather than scientists), but I knew the truth—the Visitors were real and lived in the woods just beyond my house, and everyone except for my dad and me was too dumb to see it. That, or they’d been brainwashed by the aliens.
Later, of course, I realized the only real draw my dad had felt toward the meteorite was the pull of potential cash. He learned how to spin a story for a quick buck, and from there he never looked back. To this day, he wouldn’t admit he’d made the Visitors up to anyone—not even me.
Turning away from Dad’s framed article, I switched off the light in his office and wandered to the small kitchen to look for food. My dad’s entire diet consisted of what my mom used to jokingly call “summer barbecue staples.” He would rather eat grilled meat morning, noon, and night than even think about buying a vegetable. Which was one of the few things we had in common anymore.
“Thank God,” I murmured as I popped open a fresh bag of ridged potato chips and popped one in my mouth, savoring the taste of salt. Mom typically ordered in healthy dinners for the two of us, but she’d been on a particularly intense kale-and-proteins kick this past spring. I think she felt guilty for leaving me to go on a sabbatical to Barcelona. Her trip was the reason I was stuck in Bone Lake for the entire summer, rather than the usual three weeks. On the bright side, at least I wouldn’t have to eat a single leafy green while I was here. Plus, I’d have more time to work on my article.
Back in the living room, I sat down with my chips, opened up my file labeled Bone Lake story on my laptop, and started to read through my notes.
In the 1980s, Bone Lake was a midsize town for northern Michigan—not huge, not even Traverse City big—but respectable. Most of that was due to the plastics plant outside of town, the one that employed a large chunk of Bone Lake’s high school graduates. They became line workers, technicians, managers, secretaries, security guards, janitors. The plant, Tevis Manufacturing, molded parts for the insides of large and utility vehicles, though its biggest contract was with the military. A lot of the interior pieces of military Jeeps—pretty much anything that was plastic, anyway—were made right in Bone Lake. But in 2005, all that changed.
A local worker named Hal Jameson—a security guard—died while on night duty. There was an investigation, but the death was ruled completely accidental, apparently a human error on Jameson’s part. But it didn’t matter. The incident made state news and put a spotlight on the government’s contract with the plant. Someone at some point had cut some corners, and now fingers were pointing blame. The state news soon became national news, and the plant accident was sliding into scandal. Rather than stick around and see the mess through, the government pulled their contract entirely. After that, the plant’s other clients fell like dominoes. Its doors closed for good by 2006.
Half the people in town lost their jobs. And it wasn’t like there was another plant just around the corner—with the auto industry sending its manufacturing overseas, shuttered plants were a dime-a-dozen experience in Michigan. Bone Lake became another statistic.
That was the summary of what I had so far. But I knew there was more to the story than just the numbers and dates in my research folder. Finding and adding in a more human element would be just the thing to get me into Northwestern. I started typing up a list of anyone I could interview during my summer at Dad’s. The first name to flash through my mind was Micah Jameson, Hal Jameson’s son (and my first crush). Even though I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years, just the thought of him sent a familiar ripple through my stomach. I used to get that same feeling whenever I heard Micah laughing in class, or whenever I saw him throwing around a football after school, his hair turning golden under the late-afternoon sun. Maybe first crush feelings just stay with you like that, like the residue of past emotions that fade but never evaporate entirely.
Even though I’d been friendly with Micah in middle school, I’d never asked him about his dad or the accident before—it had happened when we were so young. I hesitatingly typed his name onto my list, following it up with other people who stayed in town after the plant closed. Many—like Dex’s dad—had moved away to try to find new work.
After working on my list of who to talk to and what to ask them for a while, I shut my laptop and looked around for the TV remote. I couldn’t find it in its usual spot on the coffee table. In its place instead was a shiny, new-looking digital camera. Dex’s words from the car flashed through my mind—about how my dad had taken a strange picture as part of some new “story.” Before I could think through what I was doing, I picked up the camera, clicking it on with my thumb.
A photo popped up in the camera’s preview screen. It was a simple shot of a group of trees in the woods. It looked like it had been taken a few months earlier—the trees were just starting to grow buds, and their dark, spindly limbs stood out starkly against traces of snow on the ground.
I flipped to the next picture. It was the same grouping of trees, but this time they were shrouded in darkness. In the next picture, they were lit up with dazzling morning sun, and the bark looked almost orange in the light. I kept clicking over to see more pictures, but they were all of the same stand of trees at various times of day. Sometimes the picture would feature a bird or a squirrel in the frame, but mostly it was just the trees. Picture after picture after picture.
“What the hell, Dad?” I murmured.
And then I came to a photo that was different from the others. It had clearly been taken in the same place, but half the image was blurred out by white, as if the flash had failed, or as if someone had shone a bright flashlight right into the lens. I peered closer. Right in the middle of the picture, where the whiteness met the black outlines of the tree trunks, was a thin, dark shape. It stood out starkly from the white glare, a black line perpendicular to the ground that bent in the middle, angling off in a different direction and ending in a few shorter, stubby lines that splayed out from one another. If I squinted, it could almost pass for a long, spindly arm, bent at the elbow, its fingers reaching out as if grasping for something. . . .
I shook my head and pulled away from the image. Certainly, I could imagine Dad spinning it so the dark shape seemed ominous—this was the man who’d once passed off a bird as a flying saucer, after all. But no matter how many lies he told or how many people believed him, it wouldn’t change the truth—that thing caught in the light was nothing more than a tree branch, likely broken by the winter snow.
I sighed and thrust the camera into the coffee table drawer. A few minutes later, I found the remote control under the couch cushions. Pushing the bag of chips aside, I lay back on the couch and flipped on the TV, turning the channel to a nineties sitcom, an episode I’d already seen at least three times. It was the perfect thing to turn my brain off.
After a few minutes, I felt my eyelids begin to droop. I had the fleeting, selfish thought that when Dad came home, the first thing he’d see was me on the couch, surrounded by chip crumbs, a living, breathing reminder of what he’d forgotten to do today. I almost wanted to be conscious for that moment.
Instead, I was asleep before the first commercial break. I dreamt I was walking in the woods, lost and surrounded by black and broken trees, their branches ice-covered and catching at my clothes as if trying to keep me from going any farther.