WE’RE STILL GOING NORTH.
Stan’s driving again, and I’m just staring out the window, thinking that if I don’t make a sound, then I can maybe draw all the sounds around us right into me. And then I could drown out the echo of everything my mother just told me.
Weeks pass like this, but then I check the clock on the radio, and it’s only been an hour.
Another ten minutes pass, and that feels like a whole day, and I just want to crawl out of my skin. I feel like my guts want to jump out of my mouth and like my bones want to crawl out after them and head off in another direction entirely, like south, or east, or west, or anywhere but here, and then whatever’s left of me will just be here, in the car, existing. What Mom said. I. I can’t even form thoughts right now, the only things echoing around spookily in my head are a few disjointed words, some underwater sounds. I’m narrating all this to myself to try to give any sort of structure to anything at all.
“Lorna . . .” says Stan, tentatively, quietly, and the sound of my name pulls me up out of myself. A bit.
I don’t say anything, though, because I’m still trying really hard to draw all of the sounds into my body. Except I don’t actually have the capacity to manipulate sound waves. Or to pretend that that phone call never happened. Or to deal with any of this at all right now.
So I stop trying to deal with things. Because obviously I can’t. Stan is still waiting patiently for me to be ready to speak. I need to tell him about the phone call. Of course I need to tell him. It’s all trying to get out anyway, so why not, why not just weep all over the passenger seat, and on Stan too.
“I talked to my mom. I was hoping for my dad, but I got my mom instead. And, um . . .” And of course I can’t stop my face from trembling here.
“It’s okay, Lorna, just—”
“It’s not okay, Stan, okay?” He flinches when I snap at him, and I immediately feel bad. “I’m sorry. Just listen. Please?”
He nods, and I thank him.
“I wanted to call my dad because he’s the only one who cares about Callie like I do. I think. Jesus, I don’t know anything anymore. Hold on.” I blow my nose into my sleeve as hard as I can to mask the fact that I’m choking down sobs. “Anyway,” I go on, “my mom picks up instead, because my dad is out at the research site, and we talk, and I tell her . . . everything.” Stan starts a bit in his seat, and his eyes go wide and panicked. “I know, I know, but please, just wait, okay? I told her everything.
“And she completely freaks out. She does a one eighty, and it’s not even that she’s mad, she’s just freaked. Out. She said the government is after Callie? That Hospital Jane is a government liaison, and that the government thinks they’re weapons. She kept telling me, over and over, that we shouldn’t take them back there, that they were definitely trying to get us to take them back up north, where they came from. She said not to get between them and the government, or we’ll basically die.” And now I’m just full-on crying and not even trying to stop or hide it. “What the hell, Stan? What the hell are we supposed to do with this?”
“Jesus,” says Stan quietly.
And I look back at Callie and Ted and see them sitting there quietly, one sweet and one brooding, and I wait for the world to end around us.
And then nothing happens. The world doesn’t end. Ted yawns. Callie yawns. Then I yawn, and I realize we’re no longer moving. Maybe the world did end.
Either way, Stan pulls over. We’re sitting here in a car on the side of the highway while all around us other cars with other people in them pass us by, their lives untroubled by the kinds of trouble we’re dealing with in here. The sheer incomprehensible impending disaster that my mom’s phone call painted the world to be. Because I know my mom isn’t messing with me. Because my mom has never really ever messed with me, and on the rare occasions she attempts a joke, she uses this voice, like she shifts her voice so I know she’s messing with me, like she always wants me to know where she stands. My mom is a dedicated research scientist. Her whole life is about gathering data and then sitting down with that data and finding ways to see what the data is trying to tell her about the universe. She’s told me that the world is a series of narratives and that all you need to do is listen to the story it’s telling you. That science isn’t about deciding which story you like best; it’s about listening to all the stories as they’re told. When you’re little, you test the hypothesis. You have an idea, and then you try to figure out if your idea is right, and if it’s not then you change your idea to figure out what the right one is. You don’t change the data to fit the assumption. When you do that, you fail the science fair.
Which is all just to say that I believe her. Every word she said. Which is totally and compellingly terrifying.
“Are you sure . . .” starts Stan, after an uncomfortable span of silence. “Are you sure you heard her right, or—”
“You mean, did her voice come through over the completely clear satellite connection?”
“Or are you sure that this wasn’t maybe your mom’s idea of a joke?”
“Please,” I snort. “My mom’s jokes aren’t, like, jokes. I mean just that she doesn’t invent stuff. Her ‘jokes’ are always, like, facts that strike her as ridiculous. Like the kinds of things you see on the insides of Snapple caps. And anyway, the main reason I know she wasn’t joking is because when I was listening to her, something happened. On my end. Where I put everything together—that night at the hospital, the party, this trip, the bear—and I feel like it’s all true. The government, the danger.” Stan has his head in his hands now, and he’s slumped against the steering wheel. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what else to think, Stan! Either my parents have been lying to me my whole life or they’ve just decided to choose the scariest and cruelest possible moment—when their terrified daughter calls them looking for comfort—to start lying to me and messing with my head. I mean, which one is harder to believe?”
“So your parents are government agents,” says Stan.
“What?”
“I mean, think about it. If what your mom said was true, then for them to even know all of this . . . They’d know this because they were contracted, right? Maybe? The government wouldn’t just tell anyone something like that. Right?” He’s looking straight ahead and setting his jaw all rigid, and he smells like sweat and fear, like scared wet salt on a knife, and I’m sure that I must too.
“Well, then, that means your dad’s one of them too,” I say.
“What?”
“If my parents are in on it, like you said, and if this is really happening, then . . .”
“Lorna—”
“Stan, I just saw your brother smash a bear’s head into a highway wall. My mother just told me to let my sister die because the government thinks she’s a weapon. Callie, who is right there, in the backseat, weaving a crown out of grass as we speak, a weapon. Because apparently my parents, and probably every single other parent who adopted an Iceling, are not who they say they are and don’t work where they say they work, because they actually work for the government.” My sobs come out in short choking bursts now, until I’m still deeply crying, but there’s no sound or water, and my face is just twisting itself into all these distorted shapes.
He takes a deep breath. “You’re right,” Stan admits. “My dad’s probably on the inside of this too. He’s been looking at Ted this whole time like he might be a weapon, not because he has a kind of anger problem, which could happen to any teenage kid, but because he knows how they were found.”
“We know how they were found too. My dad was the one who found them. He told me all about it.”
“And did he tell you the government has thought Callie is a weapon from the start and that he worked for the government too? Did he tell you that they were monitoring their every mood and moment? Did he tell you we were probably—shit, I’m sorry.” He stops as he looks up at me, noticing that I’m sobbing. Cool. This is great. This is the most fun road trip in the history of the whole world. Four stars, would embark on again. “I’m sorry, Lorna. I know I’m being a jerk.”
“It’s fine. This situation is sucky as hell, but you’re fine. You’re not being any more of a jerk than anyone else would be, considering we just found out our parents probably work for the government, and the government thinks Ted and Callie are deadly weapons. And so our parents have also definitely been lying to us, about stuff way bigger than the tooth fairy or the democratic process, for our entire lives.”
“So our parents have been in cahoots with the government about our weird Orphan Icelings, about our families, our whole lives. And according to your mom, they have some sort of nefarious plan for them. So we just need to figure out what, if anything, we can do about it. Right?”
“So you think we should take them to their home, right? No matter what? Even if that’s the one thing my mom said not to do? We’re taking them back to where they were found—really found, wherever that is. That’s where we’re going. That’s what we’re doing.”
And then I look to the backseat, where our Icelings are. What do I do here? How do I ask if this is really what they want? How do I make them know that if we keep going north, a serious threat might be lying in wait? Do they already know and don’t care? Or are their minds as free from suspicion as their faces seem to suggest?
I look back at Stan, and he’s just staring straight ahead, looking as perplexed as I feel. Then I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I turn around. Callie, reaching out to me. She touches my tears, which makes me start crying again, and then she just nods over at the road, like hey, let’s get going, sister. Stan and I switch shifts. I turn the key and then signal to merge. And lo, we have merged.
So that was that. Second star to the right and straight on ’til morning, or ’til the government blows us up and our parents pull off their parent masks and are complete strangers, and everything around us crumbles and burns.