My dad, who had once been the epitome of neat-freakness, brushed aside a place for my mug at his wobbly kitchen table, where I was sitting with Nancy’s head in my lap. “Really? ’Cause it looks that bad to me. I’m not staying here, just so you know.”
He shrugged again. “You can if you want, but I won’t make you. Besides, I’m not sure your mom would let you anyway.”
I bristled at his words, and almost decided to stay just because he’d said that. I wondered if that was why he’d said it, because he knew how much I hated to be told what I could, and couldn’t, do. “She doesn’t have any say in the matter. I’m an adult, remember?”
At the stove, my dad cleared his throat nervously, and the gesture made me hyperaware that he, that all of them—my mom, my dad, and the dentist—were keeping something from me.
“What? Why are you acting so weird? I mean, besides rooming with a dog and looking all”—I waved my hand at him, indicating his disheveled appearance—“hobo chic?”
He pulled the whistling kettle off the burner and filled my mug, handing me a tea bag. I’d never really liked tea, never really had it before, so it seemed strange that my dad was offering it to me. I unpeeled the worn paper wrapper and plopped the tea bag into the steaming water. Before I
could ask if he had any sugar, he was handing me a bowl of clumpy-looking sugar crystals.
Everything in this place was sketchy, right down to the sugar.
He cleared his own spot at the table, shoving a stack of papers and news clippings out of his way so he could set his own tea down in front of him. “The reason I’m acting weirder than usual . . .” His emphasis on the er almost made me smile, like even he realized he wasn’t exactly the dad I’d known. He raised an eyebrow at me as he scooped several spoonfuls of the sugar into his mug and concentrated on stirring. “Is something the dentist—Dr. Dunn—noticed on your X-rays.”
I raised my eyebrows back at him. Got that, I relayed with my impatient look.
“So he showed us the ones he took the week before you disappeared, when you’d been in to see him for your checkup, and he compared them to the ones he took today.” He spoke slowly, deliberately. It was painful the way he drew out each syllable and emphasized words like before you disappeared and compared and today, as if there was some significance to them that I should understand. I didn’t, and I just wanted him to get to the point already.
And then he did. “They’re the same. Five years later, they’re exactly the same.”
I didn’t understand. He was looking at me as if this was a big deal, something monumental, but I didn’t know why. “O-kaaaay . . .”
“Five years,” he repeated, still doing that drawing-out thing that was driving me crazy. “Five years is a long time, Kyr. Five years and not a thing, not one single thing, has changed on your X-rays.”
I lifted my shoulders. What was I supposed to say to that?
“It’s not possible,” he finally said, making his big, bombshell statement.
I still didn’t get it. “What do you mean, ‘not possible’? Of course it’s possible. You just said that’s what he saw.”
He shook his head. “No, I mean, it’s not possible.” He said it differently now, the word possible, like he was saying something magical. “He explained it to your mom and me in the waiting room. In five years, things change, especially in a teenager. Teeth erode from wear, nerves shift, cavities change—you had a cavity, did you know that? You had a little bit of decay between two of your teeth that your mom and him had decided to wait and watch, to see if the next time you came in it had changed, grown, and would need to be filled. Well, guess what? Five years later, and it’s exactly the same as it was. Exactly. Not bigger, not smaller. Just . . . the same.”
I stopped scratching Nancy’s scruffy woolen head, and she yawned against my knees but stayed where she was.
“So . . . I’m just different than most people. . . .” I wasn’t sure if I was trying to convince him or me, or if I was asking a question or making a statement.
My dad just shook his head and repeated, “Not possible.”
“But it is. . . .”
He scowled at me like I was the one who wasn’t making sense. And then he glanced toward the telescope, and I swore I finally understood what he was getting at.
I shot up from the table. Tea spilled, and Nancy yelped as her chin banged on the wooden chair I’d been sitting in. “Uh-uh. No way. That’s what’s not possible. Dad, please, stop it. You’re scaring me. You don’t really believe . . .” I couldn’t say it; it was so hard because it meant I was admitting just how crazy he was. “There are no such things as aliens.”
“Kyra . . .” He sounded so reasonable when he said my name that I almost didn’t notice the crazy mountain-man beard or the stains on his flannel shirt—the same shirt he’d been wearing when he’d come to see me that first day. “You don’t know what I do. You haven’t been living with this, gathering information for the past five years, trying to find out what happened to you. If you’d just stop to think about it, it makes perfect sense, really. And it explains what the dentist told us today, if you’ll only listen to me. Please, just . . . just try to have an open mind.” He stood now, too, and my chest constricted as his hand reached toward mine. His fingers, though . . . his touch when his fingers closed over mine was so comfortingly familiar that my legs nearly buckled. “For me,” he whispered as his eyes locked on mine.