Bringing Chad Home
by Kay Gordon-Shapiro
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
“Hey,” said Chad, cheerily, grandly, suddenly at his side, “are you liking it here? Are you having a good time? Don’t you love this place?” He poked Felicity teasingly on the arm. “The mayor here takes great care of us!”
“I do,” agreed Felicity. She brushed her neon curls from her face, and glanced at the clock on the wall. “And now it’s time for me to head to the theater.” She gave George a glance and then headed off.
Chad touched his arm. “Look, you haven’t had a chance to talk to Celeste yet, and I want you to get to know her.” His voice was earnest. “I’m sure you’ll like her. She’s helped me so much. And I need you to help me persuade Mother, to get Mother on my side with this. I’m really counting on you for this.”
“Chad—” George started.
But Chad interrupted. “Celeste likes you a lot,” he said. “You made a great impression on her, and she really wants to get to know you better, too. She told me so.”
Really? thought George. “I’d very much like to talk to her,” he said.
* * *
Yet it was somehow harder to arrange the meeting than he had anticipated. According to Chad, Celeste spent most of her time at the workshop. “Really, you could just drop in any time, and she’d be happy to talk.” And evenings, he said, she usually gathered with the others at Mummer’s. But somehow it was impossible to get her alone, to pull her aside.
So George watched.
He observed how the group interacted with Chad, how they interacted with Celeste. How Chad and Celeste interacted with each other.
From what George could see, Chad viewed her without question, without judgment, without regret, without awareness. He found himself watching her hand, her face, her arm. And sometimes he thought he saw her limbs flicker and change color. Sometimes. Maybe.
“I still haven’t had a chance to talk to her,” he said to Chad.
“You’ll get one,” Chad assured him.
Yet, if he went to the factory, she was somehow not there. If he went to Mummer’s, she was somehow surrounded by others in such a way that he could not get her away. He caught her, now and then, glancing at him in a wary, speculative way.
And there was a distance now between them. If he had felt warmth from her before, now he felt a chilliness. Her words, when she spoke to him, still seemed welcoming. Yet somehow, she had created a distance and seemed determined to maintain it.
“You know that Chad’s not even in town right now,” said Felicity the mayor, when he ran into her at Mummer’s that evening. “He’s trying to get more financing for their prototypes.”
“But I can talk to Celeste on my own.”
“Of course,” said Felicity.
“What you said before—” he started.
“That was nothing,” she said hastily. “Just gossip. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
He nodded. “OK. I still want to talk to her, though. Where do you think I can find her?”
Felicity pushed her hair from her face. Today it was still curls, but streaky blond. The neon must have been a wig, George realized. For her play, perhaps? He wondered if this new do was also a wig.
“Well,” she said, “if she’s not in town, she might have gone up to the Notch.”
“The Notch?”
“Up the mountain. She hikes there a lot. She explores it.”
“Is she an outdoor person? She doesn’t seem like one.”
“No,” agreed Felicity. “But she does go up to the Notch. She collects rocks. Minerals. You know.”
He didn’t. And it was not information he had expected. But he believed it.
“There’s a trail that goes around back of those cottages on the far side of the park,” she said. “And then it goes up. We mostly don’t use that trail, and the blazes are faded. But it’s not hard to find.”
* * *
He found the footpath easily enough; it curled around the far side of the park. As she had said, it wound in back of the houses and then abruptly cut north, heading up the side of the mountain. The path had not been well maintained even though it was close to town. Fallen branches and sodden piles of leaves almost hid it, but he could see the signs that revealed where the path lay hidden.
He knew that, like all of New England, glaciation and, long before that, tectonic and volcanic activity, had torn and reformed the area, and he was not surprised to find glacial erratics blocking the path. But the going was rougher than he had expected. He picked up a branch, perhaps torn down by a recent storm, to use as a walking stick, which made the going easier. And he kept going, watching for the faded orange diamonds of old blazes and piling sticks and stones in make-shift cairns, the better to mark the way.
He found her eventually, cross-legged on a flat-topped erratic within a tumble of rocks that had somehow fallen into the pattern of a shelter. They had, he saw, cooled slowly from magmas, at depth — granites with angular pink feldspars, quartz, with crisp angles, long black crystals of tourmalines with bulging sides. Beside her, she had laid out a handful of smaller, unfamiliar crystals, their glowing facets connecting at unusual angles.
She looked at him without surprise. “I thought you might eventually come,” she said, with a sort of resignation. “Come, sit,” she said. She patted the rock beside her.
A limb, he thought warily. A tentacle.
He lowered himself gingerly, to a spot at the far end of the boulder.
She regarded him. “’You saw,” she said. “I thought so, but I wasn’t sure. But sometimes people can.”
They sat. She didn’t try to move closer.
“What are you?” he said.
She flushed. “I’m not dangerous.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You change your shape. Your hands, your arms change into tentacles.”
She shrugged his words away.
“And you did something to that mouse,” he said. “Your hand absorbed it, didn’t it? Those tentacles.”
“Everyone has to eat,” she said.
He imagined her with her arm around Chad’s neck, with her deft hands on his nephew’s face, with her hands transforming into writhing blue.
“Perhaps,” he said.
They sat quietly. She did not try to move closer.
“What are you?” he said.
She flushed.
“Tell me,” he said. “You say you are not dangerous. Tell me why you are not dangerous.”
She stood up, and instinctively, he flinched. She made a bitter noise, and took a deliberate step away. “There. Is that better?” She grimaced. “I’m more afraid of you than you are of me. Isn’t that what you humans say about the poor creatures that share your planet? The ones you fear when there’s no need to?”
Silence hung over them.
“If you’re not human, what are you?” he said eventually. “And why are you here? What do you want?”
She glanced up longingly at the sullen sky. “I just want to go home,” she said.
“Home,” he repeated.
She hesitated, and her hands grasped each other, writhing like the tentacles he now knew they were. “I didn’t mean to get stuck here,” she said. “I’m only a small trader, myself. A surveyor. A prospector. But things went wrong. Fuel packs are supposed to last nearly forever. But the one they loaded on my ship must have been defective. So I needed fuel. A rare form of thorite. That was all.”
“And?”
“It’s here. I found it here.” She gestured at the small pile of pebbles.
“Those?”
“They’ll do,” she said. “I can make them work.”
He did not quite believe her. “Where did you come from?”
“That’s so like you humans.” She waved a vague hand. “Up that way.”
“Another galaxy? Another part of this one?”
“Another galaxy,” she said vaguely. “Really, does it matter? It’s far away, that’s all.”
“But why didn’t you just ask for help? Surely people here would be glad to help you. If you’re from another planet, there must be much we can learn from you.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think you know your species well enough. What do you think they would do to a lone stranger from another galaxy? They’d put me in a cage. They’d dissect me. They’d be afraid of me, just as you are. They would not treat me well. Even if they wanted to, they would not.”
“You look so human,” he said.
“I’m not. But — I can coax your mind to see what I need you to see. It’s a little skill I have to protect me — a glamour, you might call it. But it’s hard — it takes my energy, you see, to maintain. If I’m tired, if I’m distracted, it can slip.”
Deception, he thought. That’s her special skill.
She looked at him pleadingly. “It’s the only thing I have,” she said. “It does no harm. Can’t you see how this is for me?”
He did not answer.
“This is such a nice planet,” she said. “The trees, the mountains, the rivers, the soft air.” Her voice was a pleading whisper. “I thought maybe that if I couldn’t get the ship fixed, this might be a place I could stay. I could settle here. It could be a new home.” She cast him a quick glance, and her obsidian eyes must have seen something skeptical in his face. “But I did get it fixed,” she said hastily. “I found what I needed. It’s fine now.”
He studied her. “Show me what you really look like.”
She shook her head. “You wouldn’t like it.”
“Perhaps not. But what could I do? What would be the harm?”
Their eyes met, and she sighed. “Who knows?” she muttered. And her form shivered and wavered. Her clothes faded, and he realized that those, too, were an illusion. Her form thickened. She was covered now in a sort of blue fur. Not fur, but stubby, waving tentacles, seeking, and alive in their own right. The long blue face was covered in the same writhing tentacles. Its huge sad eyes were sunk deep in sagging skin. Something skittered by — a bug, a small bird — circling and then landing on the blue froth of the creature’s front limb. The stubby tentacles snapped out, surrounded it, took it in and absorbed it. George watched as it bubbled and dissolved. That was what had happened to the mouse. But couldn’t she stop that, control it? But did it even matter?
George stood. “You do need to go back to your own planet,” he said abruptly. “You’re right, you don’t belong here.”
Her form shrank back into that of the appealing woman he had first met. “I know,” she said. “You don’t have to worry. I have what I need to fix the ship and it will just take me a few more hours to finish the job. I can leave tonight.”
Its eyes were bright, with tears, maybe, he thought, although he knew now that it could not produce tears and that any tears he thought he saw were illusions it had made simply for his benefit. His stomach churned. Whatever it was, whatever its intentions, it could not be trusted. Thank God it was leaving.
“Tonight,” he said.
It nodded.
* * *
He stood where Celeste had told him, at the far end of the little park across from the train station in the center of town. From that vantage point, neither trees nor buildings interrupted his view, and he could look up and see the Notch, where he had left her.
The mountains seem to go up forever, half obscured by trees and shifting clouds but he watched where she had instructed, and waited, and at the time she had told him, he saw a spark glimmer upward, trailing light behind it. It went up and up and up until it disappeared.
He watched the spot long after the spark had disappeared, wondering who she really was, hoping she could get to wherever she was going. He hoped that by insisting that she leave, he had done the right thing. But there was danger in her, there was menace. Of that he was sure. But he also knew that he would never know the whole story.
At length he turned and headed back to town. Mummer’s was crowded as usual with lively youngsters. It was comforting to see them, to watch their very human convivial chatter. He was slightly surprised to see Chad there in the midst of them. He still did not know how to tell him that Celeste was gone. But no sense putting it off, he told himself.
He caught Chad’s eye, and Chad waved him over.
“Chad,” he said to his nephew, “I have something to tell you. Celeste is gone.”
“I know,” said Chad cheerfully. “She had to go somewhere. She told me where, but I forget.”
George studied him. He was holding hands with a girl that George had never seen before, a slim, olive-skinned girl, about Chad’s own age, her curls clipped tight to a shapely skull.
Chad draped his arm affectionately around the girl’s shoulder. “This is Nyoka,” he said comfortably. “She just came today. She thinks she’ll enroll in the Drama department. I’m showing her the ropes.” He looked fondly at the girl, who surveyed him with a cool, obsidian gaze.
Copyright © 2025 by Kay Gordon-Shapiro
