“I—”
“Did something fall out of the sky?” she asks, and smiles sweetly at me. “On the day of my funeral? Tell me what you know,” she says.
She leans in again. I’m backed up against the sink.
“What if I said I was on a ship in the sky, Jason Kerwin? What would you say?”
I’m quiet for a second.
“I’d say Magonia,” I tell her.
I hear a car in the driveway. My moms. I turn to look out the window, and they’re getting out with grocery bags.
I look back, and Aza’s gone.
No. She’s under the table. Curled into a ball. She looks up at me, her eyes huge.
I get down on my knees beside her.
“It’s just Eve and Carol,” I say. “It’s okay.”
“Who?”
“My moms,” I tell her. “Who else? My moms.”
She shakes her head violently.
“No one will believe me but you. They can’t know I’m here.”
I hand her my car keys. She looks at them, confused for a second, and then nods at them ferociously.
“The Camaro,” she says. She says it carefully, and weirdly. Ka-marr-O.
“Uh-huh. Meet me in the car, back door,” I say, and then I haul ass to the front to meet my moms. I spill a grocery sack to buy her some time.
I walk back into the kitchen and there’s no evidence she was ever here.
I look sideways out the window. It’s stormy still. I can see the trees leaning over, and there’s that kind of slushy rain and I look up at the clouds and see nothing in them. No ships. No lightning. Just a smooth gray layer of nothing overhead.
And Aza slouching in the front seat of my car, fiddling with knobs. I mutter about something left at school, and the moms are pleasantly surprised to imagine that I’ve changed my ways, listened to them, and am going back without resistance.
“I told you it would be okay,” says Eve to Carol. Eve looks at me for a moment, a questioning look.
I let the moment pass. I grab my computer and my bag, and I’m out the door. I knock on the driver’s side, and Aza gazes blankly at me. Then, as if she’s remembered something, she waves at the passenger seat.
Aza never drives. I’m—
I walk around the back of the car, and open the passenger door.
“We’re going to your parents’ house,” I say.
“I’m not ready yet,” she says. “They can’t know anything. Unless they already do?”
She turns and looks at me. “Do they know about Magonia, Jason? What did you tell them?”
“I haven’t talked to anyone about Magonia since you and I watched the squid footage. They know you died,” I say. “Can we at least drive by? Just to see if they’re home.”
She sighs. “The ship will be looking for me. They’re probably looking right now.”
I can’t get used to the sound of nothing in her lungs.
She starts the car and flicks on the windshield wipers. I watch her turn the wheel, not struggling at all, even though it sticks. Her biceps flex.
She pulls out of my driveway.
“Left,” I say, when she hesitates. She turns left.
“Now right,” I say.
She turns right without stopping at the stop sign, taking the corner too tight.
“I love you, Jason.”
I look at her. “You love me?”
“Of course,” she says after a moment. “Don’t you love me?”
I look at her some more.
She’s driving faster than the speed limit, and she’s not paying any attention to the road. She’s just staring at me.
“Left here,” I say.
We approach Aza’s house.
Eli’s walking out the front door. I wait for Aza to slow down, but she doesn’t. Eli sees my car, raises one hand halfway into the air and waves.
Aza doesn’t stop, doesn’t look to the left, doesn’t do anything but drive.
Her hair is still neat in its ponytail.
“Where are we going?” she asks.
“This left,” I say. “And now this one.”
We pass through some fancy gates, up a long hill.
“Here.”
We pull into the lot at the graveyard. It’s empty of the living, because of the rain and the weekday, but it’s full of the dead. It’s out a ways from town, and on top of a pretty good cliff, looking out over the view.
It’s one of those places made by pioneers. Closer to God, maybe, if you make it higher and more precarious. I always think about people trying to pack coffins up here in the days before cars. It must have been a horrible job. I thought about it the day we put Aza here.
“A graveyard?” she says as she gets out. “Really? You know I’m not here. Look at me, stupid. I’m with you.”
Maybe I flinch. Maybe I don’t.
“I thought you might want to see where we buried you,” I say.
“Not really,” she says. “It’s not safe for me to be exposed this way.” She looks up into the clouds. Her expression is one part expectant, one part certain.
“I want you to see your grave,” I say. Of course I do. I need her to read the headstone.
She’s beautiful, in profile, her head tilted up, looking at the clouds, but she’s always been beautiful.
“I can’t,” she says slowly. “It might not end well. You need to tell me about the spyglass. And where you sent it. I know you have it. We’re running out of time.”