“I hit someone.” The words came out totally wrong.
“But, Tor.” He leaned away as though I were suddenly contaminated. “You can’t just—I mean, you called the police, right?” Were there flashing red and blue lights? Were there sirens? Was I in handcuffs? No? Okay, so I didn’t call the police.
“I tried.”
“Tried?” His voice cracked. I kept driving. “There are only three numbers, Tor: 9-1-1. How does one try? Jesus…” He dragged the word along with his breath. The space between us went silent, like a bad phone connection. The question lingered in the air half formed. Finally, Owen plucked it and the words materialized. “Did … this someone survive?”
Survive. The phrasing was so hopeful. He could have asked if the someone died, but he chose to say survive, as though he could will it to be true. “No,” I said flatly. “He didn’t.”
I thought I knew how Owen would react, but when I looked over at him again, it was pure, unadulterated horror that consumed the entirety of his face. The kind of knee-jerk reaction reserved for witnessing a mother strike her child or a man slice off his finger in a meat grinder. Owen cleared his throat and at the same time sewed up the wounded expression on his face so he wore a mask of calm.
Owen sighed deeply or as deeply as he could if he were to try to sigh while being asphyxiated, because that was how he actually sounded. “I’m sorry, Tor.” There was more. I could tell. “We can figure this out. I’ll go to the police station with you. We’ll explain.”
I looked up at him, dry-eyed. “No. We can’t.” It was too late for that.
Bert was already rocking from side to side as the wheels careened into the mud holes that pockmarked the dirt road leading up to my family’s ramshackle, old ranch house. I cut the headlights and eased Bert through the rotting fence posts on either side of the drive.
I pulled up on the right side of the house, the side closest to the storm cellar hatch.
“And what do you want me to do? Tor, we don’t have a choice. Don’t you see that?” He was still trying. He was still at the first stage of grief—denial.
I pushed the car into park and turned in my seat. “There’s no sense crying over spilled milk, is there?” In case he hadn’t noticed, the decision was made nearly an hour ago.
Slowly, Owen released the clumps of sandy-blond hair and lowered his hands to his sides. “It wasn’t milk, Tor.”
There was nothing to say to that, so I got out of the car and went around to the back, where I clicked the button on my keys twice.
The trunk opened like the lid of a casket. The boy’s face appeared, looking more corpselike this time. His lips were dry and cracked. The skin underneath his eyes had turned a deep purple. It was way too late.
“Owen,” I said, staring down. “What did you mean when you texted, ‘Eureka’?”
SIX
Applied Research: In the initial experiments of Dr. James Lovelock, a hot metal spoon was used to restart the circulation in the bodies of frozen hamsters. The key was to warm the heart first. If the entire body was warmed through a bath or other total-immersion method, the blood in the animal’s limbs would resume circulation too quickly, thus stopping the heart entirely.
*
A night breeze blew the rain’s leftover mist across my cheeks. From its perch on the roof, the old weather vane screeched on its hinges, causing my skin to crawl off the bone. Owen was halfway out of the car when he froze. “No.” He held up one finger. “No, no, no, nononononono.” Then he pushed all ten fingers into his hair and yanked at the roots. “No,” he said one more time before pressing his forehead to the side of the car. There was a pause long enough to hear crickets chirping. “Tor, I was talking about that Bruce Willis movie.” It was as though someone were strangling Owen from the inside. His voice was hoarse and he stammered. “I … I figured out a way to prove you wrong.” My heart tumbled down my rib cage. We’d been debating the plausibility of time travel in that stupid pulp movie for hours last weekend. Owen looked up to the sky and rubbed his hand over his face. “The entire premise of the movie could be fixed if the audience just adheres to Stephen Hawking’s chronology protection conjecture…” The end of his sentence then trailed off into nothingness. “God.”
The metallic scent of blood clung to the air, and my stomach gnawed on itself like a giant wad of chewing gum. “You what? Eureka, Owen! Do you even know what that word means? I thought you’d cured Mr. Bubbles. I thought you’d—”
He spun on me, the darks of his eyes pin sharp with anger as he took accusatory steps toward me. “I’m sorry for not realizing that texting Eureka would give you tacit permission to convert your car into a hearse!” His finger was now inches from my nose when he realized what he just said and looked back at the open trunk.