After the E.T. debacle, it had been an unspoken agreement in the Paradise Twin that the projector would ruin no more reels.
Even so, those reels had provided hours of entertainment. When held in front of candlelight, each frame was visible. Kit and Monty and Lakie used to take turns making up stories to match these images. Their favorites had been full of comedy or romance, images that conjured laughter; their least favorites were the war movies. Young men getting shot and carried off on stretchers. Young men smoking cigarettes in bunkers. People shooting people for reasons none of them could understand. Sometimes these people survived, but even when they did, they wound up with a look in their eyes that said, I’m just waiting my turn.
Echo’s face had a grime that would have made his Dakota’s head spin, and the way he spoke was like the words were a food he hadn’t chewed properly, but more than any of this: there was a look in his eyes that seemed to say, I’m just waiting my turn.
The group ate dinner inside the cabin, woodstove going strong. There were the usual suspects: Nico’s freeze-dried strawberry granola, more dried meats (of which there seemed an endless supply in the cabin cupboards), and the last jar of his Dakota’s peaches.
Echo had lowered the deer carcass from the tree, roasted a large chunk over the firepit. As he did this, he’d explained how his mother had taught him to carry the carcass at least a mile downriver, dress and clean the animal there, before hauling it back here. “Don’t bleed where you eat, she used to say.”
Echo ate like an animal.
Like it was his first and last meal.
Kit was a little scared of Echo. But when he thought of the bones under the tree, and the little grave, mostly, Kit felt sad for him.
“What do you do when a swarm comes?” asked Monty. “It’s one thing, walking through the woods with nowhere to hide. Can’t imagine living every day like that.”
Echo calmly walked to the pantry, opened the door, got down on his knees, and began pulling up planks in the floorboards. They crowded around, looked over his shoulder to find a hole in the ground. Lined with tarp, it was maybe four feet deep, and about as wide as Kit’s beanbag chair in the Taft library.
“I always wanted to live in a big house.” Staring into this hole, Echo’s voice seemed to take on the qualities of his name. “A house with many rooms. I tried to convince Mom that we should move. She always said, ‘We can’t evade Flies. But we can evade people.’”
Kit tried to imagine Echo in this hole with his mom and brother, cramped and scared, waiting out a swarm. And it occurred to him then that there might be more than one kind of grave.
One thing that was good: there had been no mention of Nico and Harry leaving. Kit wasn’t sure what to make of that, or how long it would last, but he wasn’t going to ask questions.
When they were done with dinner, Nico took Harry outside to pee, while everyone started claiming spots around the cabin, spreading out sleeping pads and settling in. Monty set up a mattress for Loretta beside the woodstove. “Thanks again for letting us stay,” he said. “Lifesaver, no joke.”
Echo lay down on a mattress in the corner, St. John curled by his feet. “If you say so.”
Eyes on the cat, Kit wondered, “Don’t you get lonely out here?” and only when he heard the room’s collective inhale, as everyone paused the unfurling of sleeping bags and bedrolls, did he realize he’d said it out loud.
“My mom used to keep a journal,” said Echo. As he spoke, he stared at the ceiling. “Not a diary, nothing too personal. Just a daily log. Our lives here in the cabin. Maintaining the Cormorant. Dumb shit like that. I read it after she did what she did. The last entry was from weeks ago, just as she was starting to lose it. You know what it said?” Echo paused, though no one was about to venture a guess. “‘We started as make-believe, but now we’re very real.’”
The line sounded familiar, like it was close to something Kit had read before, only not quite right.
“I don’t blame Mom for pretending the Cormorant was part of some grand adventure,” said Echo. “It gave us purpose. I guess I miss that. But you stop feeling lonely once you realize the truth.”
“Which is what?” asked Monty.
“We’re all alone to begin with.”
Slowly, quietly, the room began to breathe again, and everyone went back to preparing bedrolls.
Nico and Harry returned and, looping her arms through her backpack, she announced that she and Harry were going to sleep by the river.
“Really?” asked Lennon.
“Is that okay with you?”
“Of course. I just meant—there’s room here. It’s warmer. And safer.”
Kit thought he saw her eyes flit to Echo. “Maybe,” she said. “But Harry gets up in the night, he’d step all over you guys. If a swarm comes, we’re close.”
As Kit worked on his own backpack, loosening the cord around his bedroll, his eyes landed on the stick-figure drawing of Mommy and Me and Elefint, and in his head, he saw the woman with the huge eyeglasses leaning over one of the mattresses, telling bedtime stories to her kids while the little one snuggled Elefint, and just as Kit was thinking how little he wanted to sleep here—
“You can join us if you want,” said Nico.
Please be talking to me, please be talking to me . . .
He looked up.
She was looking at him. “Unless you’d rather keep near the woodstove, which I totally unders—”
“No.” Kit rerolled his bedding, tucked it under one arm, and stood. “I’ll come with you. To sleep by the Cormorant. With you and Harry.”
It was cold by the river, but Kit didn’t care. He sprinkled cinnamon, which he no longer believed in, but he didn’t care about that either.
He’d been invited.
Dale Carnegie and those sixteen million brains were coming through in a big way. Maybe they weren’t full of s-h-i-t, as he’d originally suspected.
He sprinkled the pointless cinnamon, and watched Nico, who was supposed to be gathering kindling and firewood, but had gotten distracted. From here, he saw her outline in the light of the moon: hood up, wrapped in that long black coat, standing on the train tracks by the river, staring up at the Cormorant. Whatever piece of Kit compulsively painted the same thing over and over again knew that he would follow her anywhere. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t even friendship, though he was glad to have her as a friend. It was the same feeling he’d had back in that synthetic town, before the wave of Flies had washed over everything, when he’d stood in the middle of a road and known beyond all doubt, I’ve been here before.
What was troubling—what stirred the very depths of his psyche—was that this feeling, when applied to Nico, felt like fate. As if she and his Dakota stood at opposite ends of the same path. And while Kit couldn’t see the path, he knew very well where his Dakota stood: at his beginning, the start of all things.
He continued shaking the stupid cinnamon, trying not to think about the logical conclusion of his little path analogy.