Ana worried that she really had dreamed up this one.
But Dr. Ruby’s camp on the edge of Perecheney remained almost exactly as they had seen it on Halloween, although by daylight it appeared much less sinister. Ragged, even—two sad tents, one drooping canopy.
When they made it to the camp, the squat man in the navy suit awaited them with a baseball bat in his grasp.
Ana was already halfway outside. Brendan snagged her arm.
“I’m not letting you face off against some—some brute on your own.” Brendan opened the glove box and pulled out a Maglite. “I’ve seen these utilized as clubs in movies.”
“You need to watch better movies,” Marissa said. “Also, who says ‘brute’?”
The squat man clearly wasn’t used to being enticed out of his foldout chair in the desert or stepping outside his parasol’s shade. He seemed rattled to see three teens headed his way. Without warning, he whistled. The whistle drew the tall woman from under the canopy. She wore a matching suit but held no baseball bat.
“I need to speak to Dr. Ruby,” Ana told them.
They looked uncertainly at each other. Ana thought she might at last hear one of them speak, but then another voice reached them: “I’m here, Ana. I’m not hiding.”
The voice emanated from another foldout chair, beside the unlit fire pit. In it, slumped almost in half, Ana found the woman who had pretended to help them for months, looking as though she could hardly help herself.
Dr. Ruby’s hair was a tangle of greasy knots and her once-white coat was covered in stains. In her lap lay a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, more than mostly empty.
“Ana! Welcome to my big reveal!”
“You’re not a real doctor.”
“Ta-da! And you’re not a real patient.” Dr. Ruby nodded at Ana’s companions, eyeballing the ruddy cheeks and makeup-smeared features of Brendan, and the lavender hair of Marissa Ritter. Despite the scars, her incredulity was apparent. “But you’ve found therapy elsewhere. So no harm done.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Not enough.” She lifted the bottle; Ana took it from her and passed it to Brendan. He looked tempted to take a swig himself.
“Dr. Ruby.” Ana spoke calmly. For once, being distant felt like an asset. “We need your help.”
“Drop the ‘Dr.’ bit. You just told me I’m a fake. It’s true. I don’t have a high school diploma, Ana, let alone a degree. Your mom was just so desperate.”
“Dr.—I mean, Ruby, why are you still here in Eustace?”
“I’m watching your damn family, of course. Why do you think I’m drinking?”
“Okay.” Ana knelt down. Ana had never noticed before, with her eyes so groggy, but beneath the glasses Ruby wore, Ruby was young, maybe not even thirty. “But you were leaving town. Why didn’t you?”
Ruby averted her eyes. “I don’t have the energy to explain.”
“Try. You’re not a real doctor, but you sometimes made us feel better. Please. Tell me why you care so much about us.”
Ruby met Ana’s unbroken constellations, the eyes healed to new. Her own started welling. “You’re the same as me. Because he left you, too.”
“Luz?”
“Call him whatever you want. He was family.”
Ana breathed deep, sat back on her haunches, and listened.
Ruby told them a sprawling fantasy, too bizarre and unfocused for any movie script. She spoke of a childhood on the road, of meeting a friend in the belly of a gorge, a friend made of light who became part of her and later hurt her, finally left her. But even after he was gone, Ruby felt the tug of him, a leash wrapped around one of her ribs that yanked her from one town to the next.
Surreally, impossibly, Ruby drove that white van around the country for years, two steps behind Luz, always arriving only days after he left some other human detritus in his wake. She mastered the act of allowing herself into the lives of strangers, employed the power of costuming. She met the squat man after Luz scarred his tongue, met the tall woman under similar circumstances.
Finally she found herself drawn to the Vasquez doorstep, having missed him by mere minutes.
Ana would have had a hard time believing all of this if Luz hadn’t always been unbelievable. Or if Ana hadn’t known all too well that the absence of a person could pull you, redirect your life and your thoughts, so why not your body as well?
All the mad, maddening details seemed less than important in the face of a single, striking truth:
Luz had wrecked others before he had wrecked the Vasquezes.
Ruby wheezed. “I don’t know why I can’t let him go.”
Ana tried not to scream, not to rush her. “You’re the one who told me about emotional dependency.”
A weak laugh. “I know. We’re chasing ghosts, aren’t we?”
“Ruby. Luz is still here. He’s taken over Milo and he might have taken over—”
Ruby whooped. “I knew it!”
Brendan growled, “You’re celebrating?”
“You have to help us get rid of him.” Ana expected a protest, but Ruby nodded.
“Come on.” She was steadier on her feet than Ana had anticipated, but stumbled once as she led them to the canopy and pulled the flap open. “I knew. I didn’t feel the tug. I didn’t feel any reason to leave Eustace.”
The objects beneath the tarpaulin were revealed to be a generator and a row of blocky machines. This was almost the exact setup Ruby had installed in the Vasquez garage, but with one notable addition: a bank of screens along the back tarpaulin wall.
On those screens Ana saw her home, the auditorium, the cafeteria, and what might have been Orson’s yard. Live feeds. Given the circumstances, the invasion hardly seemed to matter. Given the circumstances, it might help them find Milo.
“Milo could hear him all along. I wondered about that Roaring Nothing. But it’s not important.” The wildness returned to Ruby’s face. “What’s important is what we’re going to do about it.”
“I know it’s crazy, but if what you’ve got is eardrops that poison him or something, I don’t think I want that.”
“Ana. We’ll avoid hurting him at all costs. We’re all a little fond of this monster. But we’re going to have words with him. Understand?”
“A drunken imposter scientist in a ghost town just told me she still wants to be BFFs with the alien who’s possessing my little brother. Who cares about understanding.”
Ruby smiled. “Exactly. None of us get to decide, this far in, that we can no longer suspend our disbelief.”
Marissa said, “Ana, did you get into LARPing? Is that what all this is?”
No one answered. Brendan patted her gently on the head.
“A real scientist wouldn’t prescribe a termite tent and a hypnotist for PTSD.”
“I was never really good at feigning professionalism. I’ll tell you one thing, Ana, and I think you’ll agree: you’re never normal after something tears your head in two. Then again, a real professional wouldn’t mind murdering a parasite. But I would.”
Finally urgency entered Ana’s voice. “I mind more what’s going to happen to Milo.”
“Well, of course we’ll have to separate the two of them.”
“How? I couldn’t talk Luz into anything when he was part of me. Why the hell would he just crawl out of Milo when we’re asking from the outside?”
“How did you make him leave you, Ana?”
“I … I threatened him.”
“But you also made him feel unwanted. You and Hank both.”
There was no doubt about that, but Ana had never put it so bluntly. She wondered, distantly, if they had somehow made Dad feel unwanted, too.
“Milo and the others have to reject him. We have to be there when they do.”
“And then what?”
Ruby cleared her throat and diverted her attention to the screens.
“People don’t walk far on feet that small. Iris?” The tall woman peered into the tent. “Keep an eye on the monitors. Holler when you find Milo. I’d check along the roads and by the canyon.”
“Even if Milo rejects Luz, he isn’t just going to vanish.”
“No. He’ll look for a new host immediately. And he’ll find one.” Dr. Ruby rested on her laurels, fingernails to her teeth. Suddenly she held her arms wide, much as she had on that haunted night. “I’m going to invite him to move back in.”
No tumbleweeds rolled by.
“Welp, that’s positively batshit,” Brendan supplied.
Ana’s stomach turned over. Brendan was right. But she also recognized the longing in Ruby’s voice.
Ana had never told anyone but Ruby about the Dad dreams. No one but Ruby knew that sometimes, after the Chevy pulled away for good, Ana had stepped outside on purple evenings and sat in the driveway with her eyes wide open.
But even if he had come back, it wouldn’t make him Dad again.
“You can’t do that.” Ana pressed her hands into her temples. Somewhere, Luz was walking Milo away, yet here she was, shooting down a possible solution. “He’ll swallow you whole, and leave you again.”
“Don’t you wonder why Luz knew nothing when you met him?” Ruby murmured. “Not even what he was?”
Ana remembered the childish scrawl on the counters: STaY plEAS? Remembered endless questions about the brushing of teeth, about what toes were for. “He didn’t know anything.” Something clicked; looping film. “And he didn’t remember you. We’d have known. But if he was still a child after being in all those bodies … Luz doesn’t retain memories, does he?”
Ruby nodded. “Isn’t it a nightmare? Luz’s only desire is growth, but the moment he grows, it’s clear he isn’t human. He is monstrous, and he gets rejected every time. Luz reverts to mindless nothingness, an embryo of light. He can’t actually grow up at all.”
Ana’s chest ached.
“That sounds awful.” Marissa didn’t know the context, but she was right.
“But Luz is capable of developing empathy, if he’s occupying an empathetic mind.” Ruby put a finger on one temple. “This time I know about his cruel streak. Maybe if I take him in, I can counter it. In so many ways, he’s a child. If we don’t teach him humanity, where’s he going to learn it from?”
Ana chose not to blink, now for reasons unrelated to parasites, in a simple effort to take in this woman and her scars. Ruby wasn’t the same without her glasses on. She wasn’t the same without the lie. “It’s not our job to teach him that. He was supposed to teach us, he was supposed to raise us and—”
Ana bit back the words that weren’t about Luz.
Ruby set a hand on Ana’s arm. “I don’t know about you, but I’m just about fed up with neglectful parents. I refuse to be one.”
“Maybe Milo can’t make Luz feel unwanted.” Ana wiped stinging eyes. “Maybe Luz is a better family to Milo than me and Hank ever were.”
Ruby motioned with her hands. “Milo’s been signing this a lot. By himself.”
“What is it?”
“He’s asking for help.”
Something gave way in Ana’s chest. She pushed past silent bodies to find open sky. Outside the tent she slumped in the dirt, sucking air.
Soon Brendan sat on one side, Marissa on the other.
“Ana. I have no idea what’s going on, but I’m filming everything just in case.”
“Marissa. I warned you not to come.”
Marissa leaned closer. If her hair were longer, maybe lavender strands would have blended with Ana’s brown. “I have no idea what’s going on. But remember when we were making Lego stop-motion movies? Sometimes we did it at my house, and my demonic, heartless turd of a little brother—”
Ana snorted. “Felix wrecked our buildings.”
“Yeah. And you helped me rebuild every tower even though it meant missing curfew and getting grounded. And so next time we filmed at your house. We went to the kitchen to make grilled cheeses and both realized Milo was missing, and we just knew where he’d be, because little brothers are nightmare spawn.” Marissa’s eyes crinkled around the edges. “But your little brother—we got up there and he was just like you, rebuilding the sets we’d broken, putting things back where they belonged.”
“… I don’t see your point, Marissa.”
“This would work better if I could write it down. I’m trying to say that Milo is a Vasquez. He’s an annoying person who probably wants to put broken things back together. That’s why he’s so hung up on your dad in the first place, right? He’s trying to put things where they belong.”
Brendan nodded. “Oh, the incorrigible Vasquezes.”
“Right? Vasquezes rebuild things. That’s why you let me come with you today.”
Ana stared, wondering how she’d gone a single day without missing Marissa.
“Kids, we’ve found him!” Ruby hailed, bursting from the tent.
Ana was on her feet with dizzying speed. “Where is he? Is he okay?”
“Better not to ask,” Ruby replied, her mouth a line. “Just get in the van.”
Brendan promptly pulled the keys away from her. “Are you kidding? I’m driving.”
No one protested, least of all Ana, who saved her concerns for the dark of the van:
“And what if Milo’s … gone?”
“Cross that bridge when we come to it,” Marissa replied.