Once upon a time, Liv knew which names went with which fireworks. Chrysanthemums, peonies, girandolas, willows, flying fish. All she knew about this one was that it was the size of a planet, exploding into dozens of whistling pink streaks. The cornfield went purple, an alien landscape, and Liv wished for it to be true, that she’d been abducted to the place her father had believed he’d gone, and from there watched the distant earth, that tight fist of misery, finally detonate.
Before the wiggling trails dissipated, a fresh round of crackling began, and sparks plumed from a spot maybe fifty yards into the maze. It thickened into a fountain of liquid fire, higher and higher, as green and red gusts of smoke billowed. This one was easy, a Roman candle, or more likely, a ream of Roman candles. I’m here, it said in its bang language. Come and find me. She angled toward the mouth of the maze, tripping and catching herself three times, unable to take her eyes from the soaring, sparkling spout. The corn was as dry as kindling. There would be a fire. The whole field would go up. What was Doug thinking?
Liv hesitated at the maze’s opening. Mazes had brought her here. The improbable twists of her long relationship with Doug, the inconceivable turns of rogue science. The corn on either side of the entrance bloomed with phosphorescent color. She trembled; the pitchfork slipped inches in her grip. Not once had she been able to successfully trace her finger through Doug’s Trick.
She forced herself to think of the Biatalik giant paused at the fringe of Black Glade. He’d had more to fear than she did. Liv looked down, saw Roman candle sparks reflected in the glass of her father’s wrist compass. Captured there, the sparks were so small. All her fears, she told herself, could be that small. His compass told her what it had always told him: The quickest way between two points was a straight line.
Liv charged down the mown path, and when she hit the left turn she did not turn. This was corn, not electrified fencing. She hurtled through a patch before bursting into a mown junction that she also ignored, keeping a compass trajectory toward the towering sparks. The maze seemed to come alive at her rejection of its rules. Thatches of ragweed cinched around her ankles. Corn leaves sliced thin cuts into her hands, neck, and forehead. With the pitchfork she batted away the worst of the stalks, which popped like her father’s bones when hit with a baton.
“It’s Dad!” she cried, though it was lost in the fireworks’ crackle. “It’s Dad, it’s Dad, it’s Dad!”
The size of the central clearing was so big that Liv, expecting more corn soldiers, careened ten feet into it before falling. Keeping both hands on the pitchfork, she hit the dirt hard, her shoulder bursting with pain. She rolled, bringing herself to an elbow, and there he was, Doug Monk, facing away from her, squatting in his army-green shorts, holding a butane lighter to the end of a long wick. It took, and Doug scuttled back to watch it burn. Liv squinted in the strobing light. It looked as if this batch of Roman candles was wired to another, then another, a chain of fireworks intended to keep going for thirty minutes, an hour, even longer.
Doug jumped back from the new flume, his feet knocking over his school backpack. He looked feral, his clothes filthy, his face smudged in mud, shreds of corn caught in his hair. But he looked happy, Liv thought, content at what he’d built and orchestrated. His smiling face oscillated to watch hundreds of sparks fall harmlessly to the dirt he’d cleared, and that’s how he caught a glimpse of the one element he hadn’t planned for, at least not this soon.
He turned so fast that he tripped. Gorp spilled from his pocket.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
Next to the candle’s percussive reports and the ringing of Liv’s ears, he sounded distant and muted. His face squashed into bewilderment, or rage, and this time he belted it.
“What are you doing there?”
Liv tried to push herself upward, but her shoulder, her palms, her toe, everything hurt, and she fell flat. Doug showed no sign of concern. He shook his head, his greasy hair twisted like more wicks ready to be lit. He was gesturing wildly.
“Didn’t you see the entrance? I set it up so you wouldn’t miss it! I lit the fireworks to guide you!”
“Where is he?” Liv panted.
Doug looked aggrieved. “A? I told you I’d take care of it.”
“That shed over there. I saw what you did.”
“What I did?” Doug rubbed his weary-looking face with both hands, his sweat turning dirt into mud. “You started it. The first night, remember? I’m just finishing because you don’t have the balls. You literally don’t have them.” He studied the stalks she’d broken, turquoise now in the fireworks’ light. “I’m going to have to repair all that. Do you know how long this took me?”
“Doug, listen to me.” Liv struggled to her knees. “Did you hear what I was yelling?”
“We can repair it together. I’m sorry I yelled.”
“Doug! You need to listen!”
He frowned, pooching his bottom lip like a grouchy toddler. His eyes crept off across black dirt, reaching the second bundle of Roman candles as the nucleus flickered to life. He smiled, watching the sparks chisel through gathered smoke, but the smile faltered. When he spoke, Liv could barely hear over the erupting booms.
“I’ve been thinking it over, the whole thing. Building this stuff was harder than I thought. All the turns, the circles—the Trick? It’s easy to get lost in it. Real easy. You can make yourself think you’re going one way when really you’re going the other. Last night, I got lost inside it all night. Felt like a month. Felt like my whole life.”
He had been lost, for a long, long time, and Liv might have been able to show him a shortcut out if only she, too, hadn’t been lost for so long beside him. None of this should have been her responsibility. There should have been someone else to help. She thought of her stop at the Monk house. Mr. Monk was no father of the year, but Liv couldn’t believe he’d let the property slide as far into ruin as it had. Especially the collapsed roof of the fireworks garage atop the most valuable goods the family owned. That collapse seemed to symbolize so much.
The Roman candles sputtered, dunking Doug’s face into shadow. Liv, still clutching the pitchfork, used her thighs, still strong from years of training, to piston herself to a standing position. The wick on the third cluster of Roman candles crackled and glared like a cigarette, and when the first shots fired, dousing the clearing in yellow light, Doug smiled again, until he turned to find Liv upright, wielding the pitchfork. His smile dropped like the sparks.
“You’re not right,” Liv said. “You’re all screwed up. Now listen to me.”
Doug’s head grew too heavy for his neck; he stared at the ground. It was the same pose Liv had seen him adopt all of his life when facing those who only saw in him the deviant he seemed fated to become. He made a vague, rolling gesture, a sad amalgam of nod and shrug. Then, a single chuckle—a firecracker pop of self-loathing.
“Guess it’s no big surprise,” he said. “Guards at military prisons get mixed up all the time. Turn as extreme as the extremists. Then they ship home and everyone calls them psychos. But it’s not their fault, you know? They got caught in the Trick, too, and can’t remember the way out. It’s all there in those files you never read.”
Liv didn’t dare feel sympathy, not this late. “Tell me where he is. I’ll tear this whole field apart, Doug—I swear I will.”
Doug’s eyes shone. “We’re all the alien to someone. That’s all I mean.”
“That’s what I keep saying! Why won’t you listen? A’s not an alien!” Liv moaned. “He’s my dad. He’s Lee. Doug, A is Lee.”
Doug lifted his face until it was again spangled by bursting color.
“What?” he asked softly.
Liv panted, her face wild and open, begging him to understand. Colors radiated over his frozen face. Liv noted his spilled backpack, recognized the book jutting from it, and hurried to it. Tucking the pitchfork under her arm, she snatched up the book. The pages were bloated and stained, the cover snarled and smutched, but she almost sobbed, because it felt like her dad, the wrinkled cover the texture of his skin, the rain-softened pages one of his trademark cardigans.
Over two years since Lee had tried to make her accept his copy of Resurrection Update, she accepted it. The lighting was wild, kaleidoscopic, but intensely bright. She riffled through stiffened pages, squinting past Doug’s marginalia to focus on Lee’s annotations, written during his sickest period. Unlike his mind, Lee’s handwriting was focused, the same block letters he’d used to pen encouragements on English papers. This, Liv thought, was why her dad had wanted her to have the book. The clarity of these poems had cut through his muddled mind, and only here, in these pages, had he been sane.
This wasn’t a book by James Galvin. It was a diary by Lee Fleming.
He’d explained all of this to Liv years ago. Poetry, he’d insisted, is full of secrets. And here were his.
Page 20: “The sky was an occasion / I would never rise to. I had my doubts,” Galvin wrote, to which Lee had added, Doubting my memory—doubting the sky—was it a ship? Was it really? Page 42: “This is for the night your body was neither here nor there,” footnote, I fear I’ve been here all along. What if it’s all a mistake? Page 209: “Dogs howled in pain from a lethal frequency,” footnote, There were other abductees. Other patients? Page 255: “I saw / a drop of blood at the center of everything,” footnote, YES: blood, there were needles, was I in some sort of hospital? Page 252: “The little people behind the scenes are getting ugly,” footnote, Doctors—they were doctors—WAS I REALLY ABDUCTED??? Page 242: “A broken window hangs around my neck,” footnote, Cancer? Do I have cancer? Is that why I was there? Page 101: “I wanted to tell you, the girl,” footnote, How can I make this right to Aggie? Page 123: “You were a perfect stranger, Father,” footnote, How can I make this right to Olivia? Page 150: “Real events don’t have endings, / Only the stories about them do,” footnote, FIND THE PLACE, GO BACK, DO IT FOR THEM.
The italics, in other words, were his. All the things Liv had learned from Carbajal and Faddon, Lee had already figured out, until he closed the book and the truth got jumbled again, though not jumbled enough that he couldn’t lead his hunt right back to Biatalik’s front door. His parting words to Liv ached with an apology he’d only half understood: You have to let me go. I have unfinished business. So he’d gone back, to save his loved ones the grief of his slow demise, or, just maybe, be cured by Faddon’s miracles.
These events, laid bare, sickened Liv. This father she’d adored had made what could only be viewed as a series of horrible choices. He’d taken Major Dawkins’s earnest invitation to reverse his cancer with an experimental procedure out of his family’s view, but the hole he’d left in Liv and Aggie’s life had been worse than cancer—the tumors of losing him had practically killed them. And then, after all that, Lee had crawled back home? Exposing Biatalik might have been his noble cause, but Liv would never know. She’d never, ever know, and knowing that felt like being staked to the ground, forever caught.
Liv let the book fall shut. She looked up at Doug. The fuse was between batches of Roman candles, but she could see his fluttering hair.
“That’s impossible,” he said. “Stop lying!”
The firework erupted, gushing into the sky. It felt as though it had fired inside her; she shot upward, the book tumbling away, the pitchfork rising, the pink and blue smoke seeming to rise from the brain cooking inside her skull. There was no time for debate. She lurched with such speed that Doug stumbled back. Liv plunged through smoke and shouted at the shrinking stalks.
“A! A!” That was wrong, sick, irresponsible. “DAD! DAD! WHERE ARE YOU?”
There came a response, a rustling like corn leaves, but larger. Liv rushed past Doug, ducking as individual sparks cavorted along the pitchfork’s tines. A nebulous shape rested twenty feet away, in the center of the single mown path to the clearing. It was the size of a person, and as she barreled closer, Liv recognized the blue tarp, that fucking blue tarp, bound around a body with loops of duct tape.
“It was supposed to be the end of the Trick!” Doug’s voice cried from a forgotten world. “If you’d done the maze right, it would’ve been your reward!”
Liv reached the bound body and stared down in paralyzed horror. The tape was tight, but her father was alive under there, bucking to get out, a fish tossed to dry land. The tarp had started to tear, and Liv could see a dagger of pale flesh, some part of him that Doug had yet to harvest and catalogue in his jars.
Liv’s knees tremored, ready to drop to a kneel so she could start ripping the tarp, but she locked those knees back into place. There was no sense to any of it. Unwrap him, and then what? Look upon his dying body while his surviving eye took in the sight of the daughter who’d turned against him? Convince herself that doctors could save him? She knew him too well to think he’d want any of that. The true mercy here was to do what Doug hadn’t and release him from everything. It was a mercy he’d been owed since A’s advent, and the dreadful burden of it gathered over Liv like wet cement.
Do it now, before losing the nerve, before Doug intervened. She throttled the pitchfork and lifted it with both hands. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t cry. But she groaned, a eulogy for the kind of person she’d never be again, not after this. She felt a spark land on her back, sharp as a cutlass pushing her toward plank’s end.
“No!” Doug cried. “You’re wrong! Don’t do it!”
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” Liv gasped. “I’m so sorry.”
She drove down the pitchfork. A split second, but it felt like a long journey of winding turns, endless, minuscule decisions of angle and force. None of it worked well. The pitchfork was poorly directed, and the thrust hiccuped with hesitation. But it was four sharp points versus a thin sheet of plastic and soft flesh. It was enough, and she felt in her shoulders the quake of metal against bone, the spasm of shocked muscles tightening around invading spikes. Liv let go of the handle, and the pitchfork stood upright until the body jerked and the tool toppled to the dirt.
Doug’s voice was hoarse.
“You weren’t supposed to do that! What did you do?”
The body convulsed once more, then was still. Liv took a step away. Then another. Another. She glimpsed Doug clutching his head between his hands, still shouting, the main attraction of his future sideshow gone for good. Liv’s hands were numb, making it difficult to take out her phone. She toggled to the dial. Her wobbly finger, though, could not manage 911. She took a breath, swiped to Recents, and brought her thumb down on Bruno’s name. This was easier. She would tell him exactly where she was. He’d call the cops, the hospital, the fire department. He, not Doug, would take care of everything.
She heard Bruno’s phone ring through her speaker.
She also heard his ring tone right there in the clearing, a few feet away.
Liv’s eyes rolled upward.
Beneath the translucid blue tarp, a soft glow. A phone receiving her call.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh no.”