“Or that thing’s gone because it dug through our computer and sees we don’t know where Nils is.” Cora opened the window and started to climb out. At that moment, she was more concerned with her dog’s well-being than the broad, sweeping philosophical implications of the existence of extraterrestrial life, or the even more profound implication of Nils’s lifework and reason for abandoning his family in the first place being completely validated.
“Cora!” Demi stood up and grabbed her daughter by the pajamas as she tried to slip out the window.
“No!” said Olive, snapping out of her stupor. “It’ll get you, too!”
Cora continued her squeeze outside. “It won’t get me,” she grunted, pulling her legs up over the windowsill and turning her head to peek back in.
Olive clearly didn’t believe her, and her face turned livid. “You said the aliens aren’t real!”
“We don’t know that’s what it was, Olive!” said Cora, not believing her own words as she rounded the corner into the backyard.
She trotted to the other side of the house and peeked into the window of the den; the computer had indeed been carelessly left in pieces. No sign of a space alien, though. She opened the unlocked back door. “Thor?”
From what she could tell, the creature must have gotten in and out the old-fashioned way: through the front door. It being the dead of night, it may have done so without being seen. She slipped back into the house and ducked into her room, throwing on her old, peach-colored Disneyland hoodie and grabbing her cell phone. She noticed that the front door had also been left open. She started toward it, then doubled back, dug the Bat-phone and her wallet out of her nightstand, and stuffed them in her pocket.
Cora peeked into every room in the house that she considered big enough to hide a creature before Demi and Felix succeeded in removing the dresser from the bedroom door and opened it.
“It’s gone,” Cora said to Demi. “Whatever it was.” She could see a furious Olive down on the floor of Demi’s room, back turned to her. “But Thor’s gone, too. I’m going to go look for him.”
“You just said you were going to check the house,” said Demi.
“And I did. I have my cell phone. If I don’t find Thor in a few minutes, start knocking on neighbors’ doors.” She turned and all but sprinted out the front door, the adrenaline coursing through her veins begging to be burned off.
She called for Thor, turning right and jogging to the corner. “Thor!” she bellowed, past the point of worrying about bothering the neighbors. At this point, she was starting to panic. “Thor, come!” she called again. What hideous lies movies peddle, she thought, the idea that dogs survive home invasions. If there was a yappy dog making all that noise, drawing unwanted attention, why wouldn’t an alien kill it?
The thought filled the pit of her stomach with ice. She didn’t accept that yet—if the creature had killed her dog, there would be a body or at least a dog-sized pile of ash. No, that was a thought she could not entertain. Olive would never forgive her for that. After a few more minutes and another block scoured, she turned another corner.
There was Thor, sniffing something in one of the rich neighbors’ corner yards.
“Thor!” she cried, and the dog lost interest in whatever he was sniffing, ears perked up and happy to see her for one hot second, before doubling back to whatever he was sniffing.
Cora sprinted to her painfully stupid yet mercifully still-living dog. She was now on a block that graduated from upper-middle class to nouveau riche. Some of the homes here forsook lawns in favor of trendy, drought-proof yards dotted with smooth stones, succulents, and sand. “Since the alien didn’t kill you, I might have to,” she said to Thor before she saw what the dog was sniffing.
It looked like part of a footprint.
She shook her head, thinking her mind was seeing what she thought an alien footprint might look like. It looked like a bird’s footprint, if the bird weighed three hundred pounds and only walked on its toes. It had a texture to it, upon examination, like creases, joints leaving their imprint in the sand.
And it was fresh, clearly from after the rain had stopped.
“Go home,” she told Thor.
Thor’s ears perked up in the direction of her house at the sound of Felix and Olive calling for him, sounding much more desperate and frightened than Cora had.
“Go on,” she said, kneeling down to get a better look at the footprint. “Go home.”
Thor whined at her.
“Go,” she repeated, more assertively.
Thor yipped, confused, before heading toward the call of Cora’s two younger siblings. Cora looked up to see that Thor had paused at the corner. “Go on!” she commanded. Thor scampered toward home.
She examined the “footprint” for several minutes, alternately trying to convince herself that seeing a footprint here was projection, a mind trick akin to seeing the face of Jesus on a piece of toast. But she had seen something in the dark of her living room, something that looked big and alien enough to match this footprint.
In a daze, she started walking in the direction the footprint pointed, wondering if it had been planted deliberately, an invitation to follow. Surely, if there was some sort of alien intelligence capable of interstellar travel, it would be capable of covering tracks in the dirt.
As she neared Sepulveda, however, she caught the distant blues and reds of police lights about to round the corner toward her. On instinct, she ducked into a yard, slipping through an unlocked gate and hiding behind the brick wall that bordered the house. Through the wrought iron gate, she saw the vehicles glide by—not police cars but big, black SUVs. They were heading toward her house.
The letter.
A string of cold wire wrapped around her stomach and squeezed; what if they found that returned letter to Nils in the mailbox? Forget alien home invasions; what would they do if they had found out she’d lied about Nils never contacting her? She flipped out her cell phone and called her mother’s phone—straight to voice mail. “Shit,” she hissed, dialing the landline. Also out of service. “Shit, shit, shit!”
It took another three tries on her mother’s cell before it stopped going to voice mail and actually rang. Her mother picked up almost immediately. “Where are you?” she demanded without salutation.
“I’m up—” She stopped herself, remembering what Luciana said about their lines probably being tapped. “I’m right outside.”
“Cora, come home, now. Thor came back.”
“Is anything going on?” she asked, carefully sliding through the wrought iron gate and out of this person’s yard before anyone noticed her. She headed back toward Sepulveda. “Do you see anyone in the driveway? I worry we’re about to get another visit from that Kaplan guy.”
“Oh, God, Cora, come back here right now!” Demi’s voice was strained in a way Cora had never heard it before, not even in the worst fights she’d had with Nils before he left.
By now, she had almost reached Sepulveda and didn’t see any more Men in Black headed her way. “I’m serious, I just saw—”
“Oh, God, Cora, I don’t—” Demi cut herself off.
Cora froze where she stood. The light changed, and a pre–rush hour flood of cars flew past. “Mom?”