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Locked in the upstairs bathroom, he looks at himself in the mirror.
He studies his face. It’s the same face he had when he woke up that morning, and every day before that. The same eyes. The same nose. He touches his jaw – his chin – his hair. He turns his head this way and that, looking at himself from different angles. Studying himself like a stranger.
He stares into his own eyes, and wonders what’s behind them.
He puts his shirt back on. He heads downstairs.
“Ma,” he calls over the bannister. “Is it okay if I borrow the truck? I got some stuff to do in town.”
“Sure,” she says from the kitchen. “Just make sure you’re back for dinner, okay?”
“I will, Ma.”
He drives into town. He drives home, all the while perfectly, glassily calm. He has a problem. He’s gonna solve it, and then he’ll deal with whatever comes next.
In his bedroom, he leafs through the library book. He finds the diagram he’s looking for, and studies it. He lays the book out on his bed and looks down at himself.
It’s kind of like turning a dial inside his eyes. He can look at stuff the regular way – or look at stuff the other way, harder, more intensely. For the second time that day, he looks inside himself. His gaze penetrates through his skin.
His heart is beating faster. He can see it, inside his chest, speeding up.
Blinking his eyes back to normal, he looks again at the diagram. He looks inside his chest.
“No,” he concludes. “That’s not right.”
*
She’s at the kitchen table, sorting through the month’s recipes, when Clark shuffles into the room.
“Can I talk to you about something?”
“Can it wait till dinner?” she says. “I’m in the middle of this.”
“No,” he says, very gravely. “It’s important.”
She looks up at him properly. He’s clutching a book to his chest – an old library book.
“Okay, fine,” she says. “Come sit down. Come on.”
He sits opposite her, holding the book in his lap.
“What’s wrong?” she says. She can see in his face that something’s wrong. She can’t imagine what. He was just fine at lunch.
“Okay.” He breathes out. “You know that thing I just told you about last week? The new thing I can do?”
“The thing where you look inside people and see all their bones?” she says. “It’s disgusting. What about it?”
“Well,” he says. “Today I thought maybe I – I had a look at my own insides. Just to see if I could.”
“Uh-huh?” The implications sink in and she pauses in her work, the receipt in her hand hovering over the pile. “Everything okay in there?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What’s the matter?” she says. “Do you think you might be sick?”
He’s shaking his head. Paging through the book, he sets it on the table and slides it over to her. “So. This is what’s meant to be inside people, right?”
She glances at the book. He has it open to a cross-section diagram of a person’s chest. “Yes, Clark, I know. What are you getting at here?”
“Mine don’t look like that.”
She puts down the receipt. “Well, I imagine that’s cause you’re looking at them from a weird angle and not from front on like in the book.”
“No – no, that’s not it,” he says. “Ma, they really don’t look like that.”
She sets another receipt on the pile. “Clark, honey, what are you getting at here?”
He lays his hands flat on the table. He says, “Ma. I don’t think I’m human.”
“What?” she says. “Clark, don’t talk stupid. Of course you’re human. What else would you be?”
He takes a folded up sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolds it. “I’m not real good at – I, uh.” He offers it to her. “I think this is what I got inside me.”
She sighs. “Okay – let me see that.”
Adjusting her reading glasses, she looks at the drawing. It’s a rough outline of a torso – for a moment she can’t make sense of all the wriggly shapes he’s drawn inside of it. But then –
“Oh, my,” she says faintly. “Oh, that’s not right.”
“Yeah,” says Clark. “That’s what I thought.”
She puts the drawing down on top of her receipts. She takes off her reading glasses, and looks at her son’s face. He’s pale. His hands are steady. If she didn’t know better she might think he was collected. But she does know better, and she can see the cold panic in his eyes. He’s sure as heck not kidding around.
“Ma?” he says. “What are we gonna do?”
She takes a deep breath in, and out. She says, “I think you and me had better go out to the old barn.”
*
“Here we go.” She starts unpegging the tarpaulin.
“What are we looking for out here?” h says.
She pulls back the tarpaulin. There it is, silvery and shining. Still looks brand new. Exactly as it did seventeen years ago. Not a scratch on it. Nothing can scratch its surface. They’d tried.
“I thought you and Pa already looked all over it.”
Over and over it, in search of anything that might help them out – any clue as to where it had come from. A maker’s stamp. A label. A set of instructions.
“Well, you never know,” she says, her hands on her hips. “We might have missed something.”
Anyway, where else can they start looking for answers but here. Here, at his first home.
He kneels in the dirt in front of it. He sets a hand on the silver metal of its hull. He’s got his serious face on – his thinking face.
She made her peace a long time ago with not having any answers. She knows Clark hasn’t. She knows he probably never will. It’s not in his nature.
It’s a long moment before he speaks. “If it turns out I’m not human.” He doesn’t raise his eyes from the craft. “Would you mind?”
“Mind?” she echoes. “Clark, honey, why would we mind?”
He shrugs. “Cause I’m not like other people.”
“You’re not different from other people,” she says. “You’ve just got some extra stuff. That’s all.”
She’s told him before – they both have. When it had first started happening, that’s how they’d agreed to talk about it. Clark isn’t any different than any other kid – not in the ways that count. They’d told him early, and often.
“A lot of extra stuff,” he says.
She puts her hands on the cold metal of the craft. “Why’d you think we’d mind?” she says. “We’ve never minded before.”
Well, they’ve minded. They’ve minded in the sense that they’ve been concerned – minded, now and again, in the sense of being angry at him. They’d minded a lot in the sense of being worried what would happen if anyone found out.
But that’s not what he means.
He says, “This is different.”
“Is it?”
He sits back on his haunches, taking his hand off the craft. He looks up at her. “If the rest of the stuff inside of me isn’t human then maybe my brain isn’t human.”
“So?”
“So you’ve got no idea what I’ve going on up here.” He taps the side of his head. “I might be totally different from regular people in here.”
“Clark – honey,” she says. “I’m your momma. I always know what’s going on in your head.”
“Oh, yeah?” he says. “What am I thinking right now?”
She breathes out. She steps away from the craft, and going to his side puts her arm around his shoulders. She kisses the top of his head. “So what if your brain isn’t human – you still got feelings, just the same as everyone else.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Of course I do.” She squeezes his shoulder.
“Hm.”
“Hey, now,” she says. “You weren’t worried about whether or not you had regular people feelings this morning, were you? Nothing’s changed. You just know your body a little better.”
“I guess.” He looks up at her. “You’re real calm about this.”
She doesn’t panic easy.
She hadn’t panicked when they’d found a baby crash-landed out in their cornfield. She hadn’t panicked when her twelve year old had lifted a tractor like it was nothing, nor when he’d started setting things on fire with his eyes. She sure as hell isn’t going to start panicking now.
“Well,” she says, “it’s always something with you, Clark.”
He manages a smile. Reaching up, he lays his hand on the frosted glassy roof of the craft.
There’s a pulse of energy that she feels in her ears, feels vibrating up through the soles of her feet; it shakes dust from the rafters. Clark scrambles to his feet, backing away. “What –”
A glow is building beneath the glass, brighter and brighter. With a whirring it splits down the middle and begins to open up – the way it had when –
“What’s it doing?” says Clark.
“I don’t know,” she says, shaking her head. “It hasn’t opened since –” Her breath leaves her. “– oh.”
The white interior – the red and blue blankets he’d been wrapped in – the locket that had been around his neck – even the depression left by his tiny body. All of it is pristine, untouched, and it sends her careening back to that day. The cold wind. The scent of smoke and ozone in the air. Laying eyes on him for the first time.
She presses a hand to her mouth. She can’t speak.
Beside her Clark is silent. The warm summer breeze coming through the door of the barn is picking at his hair.
He says, “What’s the S for?”
“Oh – yeah,” she says, her eyes falling on it. It’s embossed on the flat surface just below the recess where he had been cradled. “You know, I forgot about that? Your Pa thought it might be Cyrillic but we looked it up and –”
Clark touches the S and with a soft click it depresses – and as it depresses, it lights up bright white.
He snatches back his hand as if he’d touched something hot.
“Clark,” she says as it glows still brighter, streaks of light spreading out from it, across the metal and glass of the craft. “Honey, what did you do?”
“I don’t know –”
Suddenly it flashes, giving off a burst of sparks, and she flinches – but they aren’t sparks; they’re motes of light. Floating upwards, filling the air above the craft like stars. Bright even in the afternoon sunlight. She and Clark stand side by side, watching the lights dance in the air.
They’re drifting closer together, forming a shape in the air – coalescing into the outline of a man. A last flash and there he is, standing above the craft.
He’s not real. He’s an image, like a movie projected into the air. But he looks so crystal clear; so vivid. His clothes are strange. His face is dignified, his hair dark and his brows heavy. He looks like an ancient statue. He has a face you’d see in a museum.
He begins to speak. She doesn’t recognise the language; it’s like nothing she’s ever heard before.
“What language is that?” she wonders aloud.
“Ma –” He holds up a hand for her to be quiet.
His eyes are trained on the man’s face, his gaze intent; he’s listening. It takes a moment for her to process what that might mean.
“Clark – can you understand him?”
“Ma – quiet,” he says.
She goes quiet, and she watches. She watches the look on his face change from confusion – to realisation – to quiet awe. The knowledge settles fully in her gut, that whatever language the man is speaking, her Clark can understand.
For the first time that day, something inside her is shaken. She’s always know there are things about Clark – things deep, deep inside him – that she’d never be able to touch. She’s always known there was a handful of months that went by before he was hers and that she’ll never know what happened to him in that time. It’s one thing to know it; another thing to see it playing out in front of her.
She takes a step back.
There are tears swimming in Clark’s eyes. She has the sense, from his tone, that the man is winding down on his speech; Clark is shaking his head, no, no, as if he can argue with whatever the image is saying. As if he can make it not be true.
The man says a last few words, and his tone is soft; it’s tender. He goes quiet. His image fades away into the stars.
Clark’s legs give out under him. He’s on his knees in the dirt, and all of a sudden he’s crying. He’s crying in a way she hasn’t seen him cry since he was a little boy, tears streaming down his cheeks.
“Clark –” She drops to her knees beside him, gathering him up in her arms. He’s too big for this – he’s been taller than her since he was thirteen – but she won’t let that stop her. “Clark,” she says. “Honey, what’s wrong?”
Turning into her body he buries his face in her shoulder, sobs wracking his body.
“What’s wrong?” she says. “What did he say to you?”
He shakes his head. He’s past talking. He clutches at her, fisting his hand in the cloth of her shirt, and she holds him tighter. She’ll hold him till he cries himself out, if she had to. She’ll hold him as long as it takes.
As she rocks him in her arms, she looks up at the craft, towering over them, at the still and silent air above it. There’s nothing there now but dust moving in the sunbeams.
*
“Here you go.” She sets a glass of what beside him. “Drink up. You’ll feel better.”
Clark doesn’t answer. He’s slumped over the kitchen table, his eyes red. He hasn’t said a word since they came in from the barn. He’s got something in his hand, squeezed so tight his knuckles are yellow.
She sits next to him. She lays a hand upon his back. “What you got there?”
He shifts in his seat, and opens up his hand.
“Oh,” she say, “that old thing.”
“Hm.”
It’s the locket – the one he’d been wearing when they found him, around his neck, the chain far too long for such a little baby. A chunky, heavy-looking thing with the same S as the craft. It had slipped off when she’d picked him up, slipped down onto the blankets, and she’d left it there. She’d always regretted not taking it. She hadn’t known that the craft was about to close back up, and stay closed for good.
“I found it in there,” he says, turning it over in his hand.
“Well, that’s something,” she says.
He doesn’t answer.
She strokes his back, rubbing circles between his shoulder blades. “Clark,” she says. “You don’t have to talk about this till you’re ready, okay?”
He nods.
“When you’re ready,” she says. “I wanna know what happened in there.
He traces his thumb over the S on the locket.
“Could you understand him?”
He nods again – just barely, the tiniest fraction of a movement.
“What’d he say to you?”
Clark breathes out. He looks at the locket – looks at it as if he’s seeing it properly for the first time. As if his eyes are just now focusing. When he speaks it’s as if every word is a strain. “He said. He said he was my father.”
Something inside her goes cold.
“Oh,” she says. “Okay.”
He breathes in, and out, a long and unsteady sigh. He says, “I was right.”
“You were right?”
“I’m not human.”
Her hand stills on his back. “Clark. What did he say to you?”
He’s quiet for a moment longer. “A lot of stuff.” He turns the locket over his in hand one last time – and presses his thumb down on the S.
It lights up; she’d half expected it to. Motes of light rise from it, forming into an image just a few inches across. A planet, spinning in the air above their kitchen table. She doesn’t recognise the shapes of the continents. The colours are – different.
It’s not the earth. Clark watches it spin, his gaze heavy.
He presses down again an the image breaks apart into stars, re-forming into the man she had seen out in the barn. Upright and stately, a formal portrait. Next to him, dressed in the same strange clothes, stands a woman.
She can’t take her eyes off them. “Is that –”
Clark says, “They’re dead.”
She looks at their frozen faces. She can’t get her head around it. It takes her a moment to process what he’s said.
“They’re dead?”
“They’re all dead.”
Before she can answer he presses the S again and the image re-forms. It changes into the woman’s face, up close. The woman is smiling. Relaxed, and happy; and her breath leaves her.
She knows that face at once – even if he hadn’t all but told her, she’d have known in a heartbeat who she was looking at. She knows that face cause it’s more or less Clark’s. She has his nose. His thick, dark hair. His brilliant blue eyes.
His smile.
“Oh,” she says faintly. “Oh, my.”
She’s thought of this woman so many times. She’s tried to imagine her. And now here she is. Her face – her image – frozen in time. Perfect. Clark’s eyes are trained on her, unblinking.
He’d been a few months old when he’d come to them. Not old enough to remember. Old enough, though, that she wonders if seeing their faces stirs something in him. Something long-forgotten, deep inside his mind. When he sees them, does he know them? Or does he see strangers?”
“They’re all dead,” he says again.
“Who are?” She squeezes his shoulder. “Your family?”
He shakes his head. “All of them,” he says. “Everyone like me.”
He changes the image again. The lights re-form into a man – into his father. The image is less formal. He looks less like a statue and more like a person. He’s holding a precious bundle in his arms, a tiny face and a tuft of dark hair just visible. He’s looking down at his son; he’s smiling, his eyes sparkling.
It hits her at last what it is she’s looking at; it’s a photo album. They’d put these images together so he’d have something to remember them by. She might not understand how it works – might not understand the things the man said, or the things Clark is saying, for that matter – but this she understands.
She’s always felt, in her gut, that he wasn’t abandoned. Even after it was clear no-one was coming back for him, she hadn’t believed he’d been abandoned. He’d been fed and cared for. He was healthy as a horse, Jonathan had said. He’d been wrapped up so carefully to keep his tiny body warm. He’d seemed happy – he’d bonded with them so readily.
She’d always been sure that someone else had loved him first. Someone had held him before her. Someone had held him and rocked him and sung him to sleep at night. Looking at the pictures, she knows without being told that these people hadn’t wanted to give him away. Something had forced their hand.
He lets go of the locket and buries his face in his arms. The image fades.
Putting her arm around him, she wonders what it is he’s grieving – the loss of his family – or the loss of the person he’d thought he was.
“Clark – honey,” she says. “Drink some water, okay? You’ll feel better.”
“’Kay,” he says meekly. He sits up. Rubs at his eyes.
She watches as he drinks the water, slowly, steadily. He wipes his mouth. He takes a deep breath.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”
Then, shakily – haltingly – he begins to tell her the whole sad story.
*
Evening finds them still sitting at the kitchen table.
“You’ll get used to the idea,” she says.
“Would you?”
“Doesn’t matter what I’d do,” she says. “You’ll get used to it, Clark. You’re made of stern stuff.”
He looks at the locket in his hand. “I’m not human, Ma,” he says. “I don’t know what this means.” He heaves a sigh. “Am I even a person?”
“Of course you are,” she says. “Those folks in the pictures sure look like people to me.” She strokes his hair. “Clark, you’re not thinking straight,” she says. “You’ll feel better once you’ve slept on it.”
He looks her in the eye. “Does this really not bother you?”
Does it?
If she’d known from the beginning, maybe it would have bothered her. Maybe she wouldn’t have been so willing to take him into her home, if she hadn’t known he wasn’t a human being. She likes to think it wouldn’t have made a difference, but really, who was to say?
But it had been a long time – she’s had a long time to learn who and what her son is.
And on some level she’d already known. Maybe it had never crossed Clark’s mind – being the way he is, after all, is the only normal he’s even known – being that they’d tried to hard to teach him he was no different from any other kid. But at the back of her mind, she’d known for a while. She might not have known the specifics, but she’d known he was something alien. Confronting it so directly is almost a relief.
A selfish part of her is more than relieved. She’d never fully shaken the idea that some day whoever he really belonged to would come looking. She’d never shaken the idea that he’d be taken from them. She’s been looking over her shoulder for all of his life.
A tiny part of her is glad to know it won’t ever happen. They’re gone. They loved him, and now they’re gone.
But she has a hundred new anxieties to contend with, rising up in her head. What if people were to find out what he is – what if someone were to find out and have the same panicked, knee-jerk reaction that Clark was having, but directed outwards rather than inwards. Had they seen the full extent of what made him different, or was there more to come? If he got sick – he’d never been sick, but if he did – if his insides weren’t human would any doctor on earth be able to –
She nods at the locket. “Are there more pictures in that thing?”
“I think so.”
When he presses down on the S, it picks up where it left off. He presses again and the image changes to another picture of them – the man and the woman. The aliens. His mother and father. Another full-length portrait, but a less severe one. They’re looking at each other, their eyes warm and loving. She’s pregnant, in the picture.
Do you wish they’d raised you, she wants to say. Those beautiful, statuesque people. The woman with your smile and your eyes – the man with your jawline, your tall frame. Would you give up what we have, to have known them instead.
She can’t ask. She can’t ever ask.
He changes the picture.
“Oh,” she says, softly, her eyes growing wet. “There you are.”
There he is – bald and tiny, lying on a blanket patterned with stars, his beautiful blue eyes squinting up at the camera. He was a few months old when he’d come to them; she’s never seen him so little. He could only have been a few days old when the picture was taken. Brand new.
It strikes her for the first time that these images might not only have been meant as a memento for Clark; that they might have been meant as a gift for whoever found him. They don’t have a lot of photos of Clark as a baby. They’d been wary, those first few months, of documenting him; by the time it had sunk in that no-one was looking for him it’d been too late.
Here he is, the picture seemed to say. Our gift to you.
“Look at you,” she says. “Oh, aren’t you lovely.”
“I look weird,” he says.
“That’s how all babies look, honey,” she says. “Even the alien ones.”
The image changes once again; this time it’s a group shot, the couple front and centre. Baby Clark on the woman’s knee. Around them a dozen or so other people lined up to have their picture taken. Looking at their faces she can see resemblances, to each other; to the man and the woman; to her Clark.
He makes a soft and wounded noise, as if he’s been punched. She strokes his back, steadily, trying to soothe him.
They’re all dead, she thinks. All the smiling, beautiful people in the picture are dead. She feels it more acutely, the horror of it. A whole planetful of people dying is remote; it’s unfathomable. A dozen people – a family – dying all at once, that she can comprehend and that she can feel.
“I’m sorry,” she says, as if two such little words could begin to cover the scale of what he’s lost. Gained, and then lost, in the span of as many moments.
He breathes out. “It’s not so bad,” he says. “At least I know what I am now.”
She kisses the side of his head. “You’re my Clark,” she says. “This doesn’t change anything.”
The image breaks apart as her leans into her embrace, putting his head on her shoulder. For long moments, neither of them speak. She strokes his hair.
What a day they’re having, she thinks. What a day.
The front door rattles open. “Evening, all,” says her husband as he comes into the house. “Sorry I’m late back – you wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had –” He comes stomping up to the kitchen.
He stops dead in the doorway. His eyes range over them, hunched at the kitchen table, staring at him like startled animals; he takes in their bleak faces, Clark’s still red eyes; the locket.
“Jesus,” he says. “Who died?”
She looks at Clark. He meets her eyes.
She says, “Long story.”
*
The thing with life is it still goes on, no matter how earth-shattering a day you’ve had. They’ve still got to eat dinner. She’s still got to finish the receipts.
She’s going through them by the light of the flickery kitchen strip bulb when Clark pads downstairs. “You still up?” she says, not looking up from her work.
“Yeah,” he says, slinking into the kitchen. He goes to the sink and fills a glass; leans against the counter to drink it.
She can guess at what he’s thinking; it’s coming up on eleven. She’d normally be in bed by now. The receipts could wait till tomorrow. He’s thinking that she’s too anxious to settle down. Well, so what if she is. She has every right to be restless, in the circumstances.
“How are you feeling?” she says.
“Better.”
“Better?”
“Yeah.”
She sets down another receipt. “Listen, Clark,” she says. “If you’re not feeling better yet, that’s okay. I know you must be hurting. It’s okay if you’re hurting.”
He says, “I know it is.”
“Been thinking about what I said to you earlier,” she says. “I hope I didn’t make you feel like you shouldn’t be hurting about this. I didn’t mean to.”
“You didn’t.”
“I know you must be grieving,” she says. “You’re grieving for your real mom and dad. It’s okay. Take as long as you need.”
For a moment he doesn’t say anything. He sets down his glass by the sink, and comes around the table.
Laying a hand on her shoulder, he kisses the top of her head. “You’re my real mom and dad.”
She sits quietly. She puts her hand atop his. “Good night, Clark.”
“G’night,” he says.
Alone in the kitchen, she packs the receipts back into the file. She can finish them tomorrow.