For the next half hour, Liv became acquainted with the pulsing torture of paranoia. If this is how her father felt following his escape from abduction, no wonder he’d created the Armory, no wonder he’d built the traps. Liv stayed crouched in the shed long after she heard Doug drive off, her head tilted toward Custer Road for the gravel snap of his return. The rain dwindled, and she began to trust her hearing.
She couldn’t wait all night. A was out there where she’d left it, naked, coated with rain, and it was unseasonably cold. She pulled herself to a standing position, scooted John out the door, and gathered the blue tarp. Before she exited, she stepped over to the far wall and removed Mist—her old ally, the double-bladed antelope horns—from its hook. She felt better having it in her hand, hidden beneath the tarp.
There was no big secret to where she’d stashed A. Thirty feet off the path toward Amputator, she’d tucked the alien under a wild hedge. Carrying A had been no more difficult than a schoolbag. It’d been shivering then; now, ninety minutes later, it wasn’t shivering at all and dread flowed up Liv’s throat. She passed her hands over A’s body. It was shockingly cold. It was too dark to see much, so she wrapped A in the tarp, both for warmth and so that no one could see it—her mother, for instance, roused from a boozy bed—and lifted it once more.
Liv charged straight through the backyard, right through the swing-set tangle, straight up the back steps, where John waited. Before she could maneuver her hand from under the tarp, she paused to marvel at the soft, peach-hued kitchen light spilling from the back-door window. Never had she seen A under anything but the harshest of lights. A looked smaller, sadder.
Mist made opening the door difficult. Abruptly, then, Liv was indoors, a landscape as foreign to A as the alien ship would have been to Lee. Liv found herself experiencing it as a skinner might. The baffling variety of stovetop, table lamp, and laptop-charger lights. The druid drone of the refrigerator. The blunt odor of air freshener. The taste of still air, like paint. Liv lived here, this was her home, but it was only through muscle memory that she was able to carry A down the hall, past the closed door behind which her mom snored, and into her own bedroom. John followed and settled on the floor, looking worried.
The bedsprings didn’t react to A’s weight. Liv dropped Mist and gingerly began to unwrap the tarp. A’s flesh emerged, stripe by pallid stripe. The skinner had never looked as freakish as it did here, beneath the Midwestern tableau of pennants and posters. Liv had the bewildering sensation that she was seeing herself on the bed, and this was simply what she’d always looked like just under the surface.
Using a sweatshirt, she dried A off. It was freezing cold, still. She grabbed the far end of the blanket and folded it over A, then folded over the other end as well. A moved then, at last, a series of epileptic convulsions, and Liv panicked, folding up the sheet, then the mattress cover, as much material as possible, snugging it around the alien and tucking it tight. It wasn’t enough; the tremors continued. A was going to shiver itself to death, right here in her bed, if she didn’t do something.
So instead of setting up her computer and finally getting down to the business of Carbajal, she crawled into the bed. She didn’t know what made her do it. Stories she’d read, maybe, of stranded mountain climbers surviving with body heat. Liv parted the layers of blankets and slid beside A, pressing close. It was nothing like it had been with Bruno in the costume room, where each part of her had found a natural opposite. Nothing fit. A’s round head rolled off her cheek like a ball she couldn’t balance. Its shoulder bone jabbed her sternum. Its backward-bent legs pressed painfully against her shins.
None of it mattered. She curled her arms around A’s cool, fragile body and held tight. It shivered. Was it because of bodily chill or her aberrant human touch? She placed her lips against its earholes and shushed like she used to shush John when he was agitated by thunder, except in these shushes she hid words: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. She stroked A, too, hoping to generate warmth, her fingertips still surprised by the terrain of webbed membranes, bony extrusions, and shriveled tumors. She closed her eyes and told herself that this was Bruno. Or her mother, or her father, anyone at all overdue for embrace.
Soon she didn’t know the difference between A’s extremities and her own. The skinner’s heart recovered a stable tempo, and Liv’s breathing, in response, leveled off. From under her own ribs radiated an unexpected feeling. It wasn’t happiness—there was too much to fear—but it was, she thought, a type of contentment, maybe brought on by exhaustion, maybe not. The police could wait until morning. Right now, A needed warmth and sleep before suffering renewed trials.
Liv closed her eyes, cupped A’s head, and tucked it beneath her chin. There, it fit after all. Tomorrow, she told herself. Her confession to police, the fallout, the taking away of A—all sorts of hell could be confronted tomorrow. Tonight she was tired. It seemed as if her bed was a box of fine sand, and she sank into it until she was covered. She fell asleep and had a dream that felt very real: A’s thick, three-fingered hands moving clumsily across her body as it tried to pull bits of bedsheet over the scrapes she’d suffered in the shed, bandaging Liv as she, for so long, had bandaged it.