She was supposed to be asking for technological advances in transportation and communications, for new methods of agriculture to help human crops coexist with the invasive purple weeds that grew from the Eridani spores. She was supposed to infuse her spoken words with a plea for these things, so that the aliens would hear their needs in the spaces between her words. Instead, she thought of all the people she had lost in the sporefall and the chaos afterwards—relatives, coworkers, neighbors, friends.
Give them back, she pleaded. The Eridani were so advanced; there had to be something they could do. “Surely there is some technology you have that can help us.”
Eridani 17 thinned itself entirely into cloud, leaving the purple sweater in a puddle on the floor. It reformed itself into the shape of Gavin, her neighbor’s four-year-old son who had died from the spore. The boy sat cross-legged on the floor and in his lap was a tightly swaddled baby with a drooly grin and dimpled cheeks. Lexi.
The alien had somehow called the children from her mind, but the scene that it created was not a remembered image. Gavin had never met Lexi. And yet, if he had, this was exactly how it might have looked. The boy’s expression was a mix of curiosity and wariness, and Lexi—
She very nearly said what she was thinking, that she would give anything to have her back. Her death, and Ellie’s breakdown, was destroying Oskar. Each death from the spore cascaded into a thousand unwanted consequences, and all the world was broken now. There must be some way the Eridani could undo time or reshape space and reverse the deaths they’d caused. There had to be a way.
Gavin held Lexi with one arm and raised the other up in front of him. He thinned his fingers, which was disconcerting. Jessica knew the ghosts were really just Eridani 17, but human fingers shouldn’t thin the way that Gavin’s were thinning.
“You will give us back the ones we’ve lost in exchange for,” Jessica paused to study the map that hovered where Gavin’s hand should have been. “The entire West Coast?”
It snapped Jessica back to reality. The Eridani had always shown remorse for what they’d done. They’d claimed to be unaware that the planet was inhabited, that they would not have sent their spore and, later, their colony ships, if they had known otherwise. She hadn’t expected them to use her grief to their advantage in negotiations. She could not trade that much territory, not for mere ghosts.
“Not for shadows and memories,” Jessica said.
Gavin leaned forward and kissed baby Lexi on the forehead. It was so close to what she wanted, they were almost real. Better than Ellie’s empty bundle of blankets. Close enough, perhaps, to pull her sister-in-law back to reality. So close to what she wanted, and yet so far. And she couldn’t trade that much territory even if the Eridani offered to pull the actual children from the past. “I am not authorized to negotiate concessions of this magnitude.”
Gavin and Lexi melted right before her eyes, merged into a puddle, and reformed into the default frogform of Eridani 17. The entire session was recorded, and back on Earth it was undoubtedly already being analyzed. They would see the tears in her eyes, and she would be sent back to the planet in disgrace. Back to Earth, but not back home. Home was a place that still had those children in it.
Oskar got home from a long shift of weeding alien foodplants out of the avocado grove. His hands were stained purple and smelled of licorice. He set a 10 pound bag of avocadoes on the counter. He should trade some avocadoes to the neighbor kids for one of the trout they farmed in the courtyard fountain, but he didn’t want to eat. He shut himself into his sister’s guest bedroom and stared at the ceiling, crushed beneath the weight of his bad choices.
He shouldn’t have left Ellie.
The walls were covered in sketches of his wife. Her smile, her eyes, her slender hands. Cheeks dotted with pale brown freckles. Hair tied back with a few loose strands to frame her face. She was the one who left him. She left reality behind and spent all day pretending a bundle of blankets was their baby girl. No one could blame him for not wanting to relive that kind of pain, day after day. He’d tried for months. Marybeth was a family friend, and he’d given her everything they had to take care of his wife.
All of that so Oskar could go and find his sister, Jessica. He’d been worried that she might need help, but she wasn’t sitting helpless in her apartment. No, she’d gone off to the space station to be one of Earth’s ambassadors. This was supposed to be his big chance to not be the baby brother anymore, to swoop in and save Jessica from the post-invasion chaos, and she hadn’t needed him at all. She never did. He had no idea if she’d even gotten the message he’d tried to send.
Someone pounded on the door. Probably the neighbor kids. Brayden liked avocadoes, and trading with him was a better deal than trying to buy them somewhere.
He opened the door. “Jessica.”
“I can’t believe you changed my locks.” Jessica faked a scowl, then grinned and gave him a big hug. “You look like crap.”
Oskar retreated to Jessica’s guestroom. His sister hadn’t understood how he could come down here and leave Ellie behind, no matter how he tried to explain.
People started pouring in from the east. They moved into abandoned apartments, office buildings, malls. Los Angeles turned back into a bustling city. Jessica said that the government had traded Arizona and New Mexico to the frogs. All the extra people made it harder to get work. His heavy heart made it harder to wake up and face the day.
On his second straight day of refusing to get out of bed, Jessica marched into his room like she was twenty and he was ten, and she could boss him around. “Draw me a bird.”
“Go away,” he said. There were no birds, and he could see right through his sister’s scheme. Birds were from happier times. She thought sketching a picture would pull him out of this funk. She was wrong. Remembering the way things were would only make it worse. “There are no birds. Sporefall killed them all.”
“Think of it as rent. It’ll do you good to draw something other than Ellie, over and over again. All I’m asking for is one really good picture of a bird.” Jessica left without waiting for him to answer.
He only had a few sheets of good thick paper left, he’d used most of it to draw his pictures of Ellie. He got one out. He closed his eyes and tried to picture the stellar jays that had eaten peanuts from the feeder outside his window, back before the sporefall. He remembered blue and black feathers, and the general shape of the head, but the details were fuzzy. There were pictures of birds in books, but he shouldn’t need that. He should be able to do this. It had only been a year.
For the first time in weeks, he opened the guestroom blinds. The apartment was on the fourth floor, and the window looked across the alley at a near-identical brick building. He tried to imagine birds flying in the alley, landing on the concrete below to hunt for bugs or seeds, but thoughts of flying set his mind to thinking about soaring out through the window and falling into oblivion.
He closed the blinds.
Two days later Oskar had only one sheet of good paper left, and he had not yet managed a picture of a bird. He ate when Jessica forced him to, and he slept until Jessica made him get out of bed. There was no point to pictures of birds. There was no point to anything, not anymore.
Jessica came in with half an avocado. Did he really have to eat, again? But no, she started eating it herself, spooning the mushy green into her mouth and smiling as though it actually tasted good to eat a plain avocado, again. “This is the last one from the bag, and food rations have been short at the community center, so we can’t count on that. We need to decide what to do next. There’s a caravan going north, right through Portland.”