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.